season’s greetings and happy holidays
First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
If you celebrate neither and won’t be taking holidays, take comfort that you won’t be alone. I’ll be working throughout the last days of the year. Some hardware for my project is coming in so late that I have to work throughout the holidays to get things back on schedule. Pesky day job…
For diyparadise, it has been another bumper year. There were less new products than I hoped/planned for. However, this only means 2009 will be even more exciting!
It’s great to finally take part in an audio show. Though it’s local (in Malaysia), it’s still a good experience. Also, I finally listened to our Hedlund Horns in a totally different environment. This helps me to understand horn’s strengths and weaknesses better. If we didn’t participate in this audio show, I wouldn’t learn more about this. Hey, no one lugs around 80kg of speakers (each weighs that much!) around for audition!
The audio show also afforded us the rare opportunity to meet so many customers. You know, we are hermits. We only meet with our suppliers, vendors and Fedex delivery guys. Occasionally we meet up with customers, but it’s more of a one-to-one basis, and never more than 5 in one go. So imagine meeting up with over 2500+ visitors in 3 days!
Just before the end of the year, I’m proud we managed to launch Beyonce! - our volume control/preamp kit. You could view her as the successor to our earlier Maggie the autoformer volume control. And we have more products coming up!
On the forum, you noticed I showed pics of a DAC-Preamp, that’s Monica and Beyonce in one chassis. I really like this concept and feel that you get much better sonics this way rather than having a pesky interconnect cable in between. How do we know this? Because we have tried so.
In the pipeline for 2009, we should be releasing Charlize’s more powerful sister, at 100W per channel!
New speaker products! We are pleased to now distribute the excellent Merrill DCA speaker drivers and it just makes perfect sense to sell them in speaker enclosures! You could view these as the successor to Sophia, our SeTH Horn based on the Jordan JX92s.
Tube preamp/headphone amp. This has taken quite a while but I hope we could release in the coming year.
Phono stage. Oh yeah, we are not all DIGITAL crazy. We know some of you are anal, err I mean, analog guys too, so we got to have something for you guys too.
Oh well, that’s just some of the products we intend to launch in 2009. No promises they will see the light of day. *Sometimes I’m just talk!* But rest easy, as always, we have your sonics in mind.
Again, Merry Christmas! Happy New Year and Happy Holidays!
20 December 2008 | diyparadise | No Comments
Termites prefer hard wood?
In the Oct 2008 edition of Hifi World, there was a mention of us as Noel Keywood visited our room during the recent KL International AV 2008 show.
Hey! It’s nice to see our mug shots there! I believe this lends this mag a bit more of a “GQ” appeal? 
I thought of hanging around the newsstand and autographing buyers of the mag… Narcissus would have been proud!
Err, humbly allow me to point out 2 problems though.
Noel got our domain name wrong. It’s diyparadise.com, not diyparadise.com.my. When I first started the site, I never thought of restricting to a .my domain name. I was thinking who knows where will I be based in the future? Anyway, this is a minor gripe.
Noel remarked that he was worried whether termites will attack our speakers since we build with tropical hard wood here. He mentioned he saw some termite attacks at some hotel lobby in this country.
Hmm… Termites attacking our speakers? Being curious, I went all out to catch a few termites. Phew! Tok me some effort here! And finally caught some of these dirt burrowing insects. There was this piece of rotten wood on the ground and if you kick it, it’ll come apart due to the extreme efforts of these little gremlins.
I started my interview. There was a worker, a soldier and one fat looking ‘”queen” I believe.
I asked them, what’s their favourite food? Why, it’s wood of course!
Dang, have to be more specific. So given a choice of solid wood, fiberboard and chipboard, which would you prefer?
In order of preference, it’s chipboard and fiberboard first, then solid wood.
Huh? Why so? Why not go for solid wood first? Well, apparently solid wood is “denser”, “tougher to chew” while fiberboard and chipboard, being man made and processed, it’s a lot easier to their mandibles.
Among solid wood, then their preference is of course the softer variety, followed by the medium and they totally dislike hard wood.
Hey! So this means that our speakers, being constructed of a mixture of medium hard and hard wood will be a turn off to them!
And speakers constructed of fiberboard and chipboard are favourites of termites!
Which points to roughly 99.99% of speakers made in the world! Chances are the speakers that’s playing in your room now is most likely made of Medium Density Fiberboard (termite food!). Don’t let the veneer fool you ok? It’s still not solid wood.
Phew! Am I glad to hear that! So happily I released them termites.
If they said they prefer solid wood, I would most certainly squash them…
10 October 2008 | diyparadise | No Comments
Buffer Tweak on all Monicas
One of the highest recommend tweak for all versions of Monica is the JFET buffer tweak. This tweak has been described on this page using 2N3819 JFETs.
Since I finally got the 2SK170s, thought it’ll be beneficial to show how it’s done to your Monica. Note that the tweak on the main site uses 2N3819 and had the output caps soldered out. This tweak here does not remove the output caps but involves cutting PCB traces.
FIrst off, solder your 2SK170s like this.
You then need to cut the trace linking the I/V resistor to the output Black Gates caps. Shown here is for one channel. Confirm with a multimeter the trace is open before proceeding with the next steps.
Installed the pair of 2SK170s. VCC (24VDC) could be tapped from upper most end of the trim pot.
Another view with both channels installed.
This view shows the cut trace for both channels.
After everything’s soldered. Power her up. All LEDs should light up as before and confirm voltage across I/V resistor measures about half of your power supply. Then play music!
If there’s no sound, you have made a mistake somewhere. Don’t blame me. 
As usual, with all mods, you are on your own. So be careful!
19 September 2008 | diyparadise | No Comments
