Creek with a tweak

One of the more interesting projects for me was building a tweaked clone of Creek 4330.

It was designed for Creek by diyAudio member x-pro; the schematic is available on his web site. The tweak was the topic of x-pro's paper and was discussed on diyAudio.com. In 2009, this design generated enough interest on one of Russian DIY forums for a group buy of PCBs and some components.

I used a PCB from that group buy, a compact chassis from modushop, and a K4700 speaker protection kit from Velleman. I was very pleased with the result. Thank you x-pro for sharing the design!

Elekit TU-879S

Elekit TU-879S is the best sounding kit I have ever built. With my Fostex BK-20 DIY full range speakers I mentioned a couple of posts earlier, the sound is fantastic.

If you are not into single ended output, low power tube amplifiers, this amplifier may totally turn around your views on music reproduction. It is a classic two stage amplifier with a triode in the first stage and a power beam tetrode in the second with a global negative feedback applied to the cathode of the triode. Many variants of this circuit are available online, as are many suspicious implementations. When built from scratch, it can be sensitive to the layout and wiring and tricky to properly adjust (it will work but may not show its full potential), but thankfully the kit takes this difficulty away.

Sadly, the kit is now out of production, although TubeDepot says there is an alternative.

(better pictures to be posted later)