So after months of debating which DIY pre-amp kit would be my first I found out about Orphan Audio and their CA-227 pre-amp kit. It took me about 3 days to build and a lot of that time was waiting or getting extra parts that I didn't have (wire, knob, etc). The case is their modular case and it can house two of the pre-amps, I only have one right now because I wanted to try one out first.
I ran into an issue when I first powered it up: the sound was tiny and fuzzy sounding. I kept looking over all the solder points and connections in the pre-amp and then I decided to plug a working pre-amp into my A/D converter and record something and it did the same thing, it ended up being a bad microphone cable!
I'm really happy with the sound of the unit. The sound is very open and big sounding. There will definitely be a lot less mixing work to do with a pre-amp like this because it already has a record quality sound to it from the get-go.
For the power supply there is a Five Fish Studios 2448 kit running at +28V, -28V, +48V. The toroidal transformer is an Amveco mini-series 22V/35VA model.
Here are some pictures of the completed unit:
I ran into an issue when I first powered it up: the sound was tiny and fuzzy sounding. I kept looking over all the solder points and connections in the pre-amp and then I decided to plug a working pre-amp into my A/D converter and record something and it did the same thing, it ended up being a bad microphone cable!
I'm really happy with the sound of the unit. The sound is very open and big sounding. There will definitely be a lot less mixing work to do with a pre-amp like this because it already has a record quality sound to it from the get-go.
For the power supply there is a Five Fish Studios 2448 kit running at +28V, -28V, +48V. The toroidal transformer is an Amveco mini-series 22V/35VA model.
Here are some pictures of the completed unit:
