Noir, a two transistor headphone amp: class-A, single ended, 150mA bias

It still fits into the same enclosure, but it doesn't work with the store included front panel. No problem I'll do my own...

Whoops, I forgot to say: if you decide to make a front and rear panel from PCB material, similar to the Noir package of 3 PCBs in the Store, then I recommend you work closely with your PCB fab / vendor on that. You want to absolutely ensure that the fab-lot ID number, which the fab adds to your silkscreen layer(s), ends up on an interior face of the panel. You don't want to ruin the sleek looks of your panel design with an ugly 12-character string in the middle of a blank area.

In my case, for my low volume prototyping runs before handing off to the Store, I decided to reverse (i.e. swap) the top and bottom layer of the front and rear panel PCBs. Why? Because my fab's ironclad rule is to put the ID number on the top layer. So I designed my panel PCBs such that "top" == "interior". This is inconvenient but not impossible; design and lay it out with top == interior, and then run Gerber View a few dozen times, to become absolutely certain everything which needs to be mirrored, IS mirrored. Check, double check, and check again.
 
Added a mute timer and relay to remove start-up thumb...
SB
 

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Do you have an unused Ethernet cable? It’s a great source for wire for projects such as this. I used a strand of wire from such a cable in mine, not sure if it was 28ga specifically, as it’s not particularly critical.

Definitely a good source of input cable.

Just test a strand out for soldering first - the first cable I tried seems to have been made from aluminium or something and I couldn't get the solder to stick. A pain in the ... when you've already threaded the ferrite core..!!

The second cable I chopped was copper strand :happy1:
 
Finished!

Here my finished Noir. Biased without any issues.

Sounds fantastic both with my HD600s and F5 as preamp on initial listening! Gain is too high to be really usable in my main system though, where I usually use my ACF 12VAC buffer as line stage. So I'll probably keep it as a HPA. Might be time for a B1 build at some point......

I ended up using a wire from a never-used Ethernet cable and it fittet through the core pretty much exactly 11 times. The rest of the wiring is 16AWG PTFE that I had left over from my F5 build. Overkill? Probably 😀

Looking for ways of using up the Ethernet wires now. What kind of AWG is suitable for preamps / HPAs usually? Double them up?
 

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Just built up one of these yesterday since I’m now stuck inside and getting seriously bored. It’s been in continuous operation for around half a day, but I can tell it shows serious promise. Already it sounds much better than both Whammy and my build of the F5 HA.

It’s open and airy with a very mid-forward presentation that mates better with the TR-X00 than the HD-650s. It’s also bringing up serious flaws with my source so I guess a new DAC is now in order. Overall I’m very impressed with the kit. Anyone here get around to trying any upgrades with it?