Building a Headphone Amp

[hitman47]

Alright, so I went to the only electronics store anywhere near me that has stuff like this and got some replacement MOSFETs (turns out I actually fried one of those) and got some additional resistors and caps that the original design didn't include, but the PCB has holes for them. BIG MISTAKE. I had jumpered the resistors when building the amp and spent like 2h getting out the jumpers and soldering the 4 resistors in, it was a fucking pain cause the holes were clogged and I nearly lost it. But I'm done with that now and I only have to connect the new MOSFETS and the new bypass coupling caps (I might take those out again depending on how it sounds, I actually wanted to get foil caps but the store only had ceramic ones with a high enough voltage rating, they should be 250V for some reason and now I ended up with some 3000V rated ceramic caps, lol) and then I'm (finally) done. I can't wait to just enjoy the sound

[Spart]

Alright, so I went to the only electronics store anywhere near me that has stuff like this and got some replacement MOSFETs (turns out I actually fried one of those) and got some additional resistors and caps that the original design didn't include, but the PCB has holes for them. BIG MISTAKE. I had jumpered the resistors when building the amp and spent like 2h getting out the jumpers and soldering the 4 resistors in, it was a fucking pain cause the holes were clogged and I nearly lost it. But I'm done with that now and I only have to connect the new MOSFETS and the new bypass coupling caps (I might take those out again depending on how it sounds, I actually wanted to get foil caps but the store only had ceramic ones with a high enough voltage rating, they should be 250V for some reason and now I ended up with some 3000V rated ceramic caps, lol) and then I'm (finally) done. I can't wait to just enjoy the sound

And that sir is why I don't think I could build my own. I don't have the patience!

[hitman47]

Alright, so I went to the only electronics store anywhere near me that has stuff like this and got some replacement MOSFETs (turns out I actually fried one of those) and got some additional resistors and caps that the original design didn't include, but the PCB has holes for them. BIG MISTAKE. I had jumpered the resistors when building the amp and spent like 2h getting out the jumpers and soldering the 4 resistors in, it was a fucking pain cause the holes were clogged and I nearly lost it. But I'm done with that now and I only have to connect the new MOSFETS and the new bypass coupling caps (I might take those out again depending on how it sounds, I actually wanted to get foil caps but the store only had ceramic ones with a high enough voltage rating, they should be 250V for some reason and now I ended up with some 3000V rated ceramic caps, lol) and then I'm (finally) done. I can't wait to just enjoy the sound

And that sir is why I don't think I could build my own. I don't have the patience!

Well, building your own amp isn't really hard if you know what you want to do from the beginning, the problem is that I only found the complete schematic for the PCB version after I ordered everything so I didn't have any bypass caps and input resistors. But the soldering part is really not hard to do if you don't have to replace anything on a PCB. I'd say I was done with the soldering after about 1.5h the first time and I'm a complete noob when it comes to DIY electronics. And the sound quality it delivers (or rather delivered when it worked) was A LOT better than the headphone output of our expensive ass Denon CD player (although that one's from the 80s/90s so the quality won't be entirely up to current high end standards, but still, it cost like 2000 bucks), so I'd say it does pay off. And if you go for the custom Hammond enclosure, you won't even have to do any casework. I say go for it, it really pays off and there's really not a lot of debugging to do with such an easy design (in fact, it worked for me from the start, after I'd soldered the power input jack with the right polarity)