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…

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!

Printed out 2000 flyers and gave out the last one at almost the last few minutes of the show. And I was so close to printing just 1000 pieces.

My thoughts? Here’s a few thoughts. First the minus.

1. I find that many Malaysians do not even give their countrymen a chance. They passed by, had a look, and when they realized it’s all locally made, quickly walked away. Nary a listen. Sad…

2. Didn’t know there are so many speaker designers in Malaysia! Well, that’s what they claimed. Each gave interesting comments. Some were a bit strange like… where is your speaker driver? They couldn’t even locate the speaker driver!

3. Many did not bother to stay long enough. I believe we were the only room to play such a huge variety of music but in order to listen to different types of music and the different virtues of the system, you got to sit down for a while. I guess they weren’t keen to give us a chance after all.

4. Room acoustic simply sucks. Despite the room treatment we did, it still wasn’t enough. If we had more time to tame the room, we could certainly do more. The listening hall in my home has more width but less depth. The resultant sound is more open and “lighter”. Light as in being “more agile”. We don’t get this in the hotel room.

5. Some folks commented not enough bass. This being horns, we advised them to sit further behind as the bass waves would be thrown further. They wouldn’t and preferred to sit in front. Then complain not enough bass. Oh well…

Okay, the plusses.

1. Met many interesting folks! Made many new friends!

2. Interestingly, we had many listeners coming to our room for 2 consecutive days. Some even for all 3 days! I guess we must have done something right!

3. We received many positive feedback. Some say that they are proud to know that Malaysians can do something like this! Hey, after all, we are the ONLY one with a full 100% Malaysian designed and built system.

4. It’s refreshing to have folks ask for different types of music. It’s sickening to hear only of “audiophile approved recordings”. It’s refreshing to hear requests for AC/DC, Led Zep etc. And I believe we are the only room to play such music!

5. Many just love the speakers! Simply couldn’t believe their eyes. Gabriel’s craftsmanship is evident here.

6. The most important impression we made was to a close friend of ours. Just days before the show he called me up and asked me whether I’m sure I wanted to bring the horns there. “No highs, no lows” were his exact words. When he came on Saturday, he stayed the longest. He left and then came back again and stayed till the end of the day! And he admitted that all this while perhaps he has not had the chance to listen to properly designed horns. Well, late Saturday evening, we had a rock concert there. It was loud, it dynamic and it was alive! And our friend is not a convert!

Overall, we are glad to showcase our capabilities. We are glad to come out of our homes and meet people.

If you visited us at the show, many thanks for your support! Write to us and send us some pics!

The past few weeks of soldering, prototyping, trying out new circuits, tidying up existing mess, resolving logistic issues etc is now over! And we are finally making our debut at an audio show, after these years of operation.

And even though it’s just the first day, it is an awesome ride!

First thing first, met so many interesting characters. Many just couldn’t accept the sound of a single driver in horn enclosures. Some wouldn’t even give a chance but those that do, were mostly seen leaving with smiles on their faces! Quite a number left, then came back, left again, then came back again. Hey, if they left and came back, then spent even more time listening, I bet there’s something going on between their ears!

Most, as expected, never had a chance to listen to such a system before. More so a 100% designed and built in Malaysia system. I mean where else can you listen to such a system? Ha ha!

More so a vintage (>30 years) Coral Beta 6 in Hedlund horn enclosure? Being driven by a modified Squeezebox 3 (or a CDPRO2 based transport), then via Whitesnake! to Monica3, to Maggie2 (our new remote controlled volume control), to the 6GM8 tube preamp with output transformers, then lastly to Charlize2?

And all power supplies with the exception of Charlize2 is running off individual balanced isolation transformers. Charlize2 runs on a huge 12V 7Ah Hitachi battery.

And, to make things even more interesting, we don’t just play “girl and guitar” simple stuff. We play, among others, Carmina Burana, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Empire Brass, the Apocalypto soundtrack…  In short, we had blues, jazz, rock and lots of lots of heavy stuff!

So who said single drivers can’t rock? At one point, when playing Jennifer Warnes’ “Way Down Deep”, the bass could be felt several rooms away!

Incidentally, we found that we have the most visitors flocking into the room whenever we play a heavy bass stuff. Seems like most folks just couldn’t believe all this energey could be projected so far and all from a 12V 10W class T amp! Way to go Charlize!

However, to me, the best part of the day is definitely at the last. At around 7.30pm, when the show is supposed to have ended, we blasted B52’s “Rock Lobster”, just for fun, when this music attracted the attention of an Italian couple.

After finding out they are Italian, I then told them about our lovely DAC is named after the even lovelier Monica and… guess what? They were suprised to have finally found us! It seems that they have been in Kuala Lumpur for 4 years and have been trying to find us, and they finally found us! Just when they were going to leave the show at the very very end.

Talk about destiny…

Will call it a day here. The weekend (Sat & Sun) is supposed to be the busy time so we’ll have to have a good night’s rest here. The stout should help.

I’ll update the blog with pics later. My digicam is with my wife, who is holidaying in Bangkok…

Our very first time at an audio show!

We promise you, it’ll be worth your time. We have something new, something special in store…

KL AV 2008. JW Marriott Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. 25-27 July 2008.

See you there!