Sontec x 8 Build Thread

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spase said:
can you pm the price for that 8 sontec boards please.Thank you

The price is about 240euros iirc.

But i remember you asking me questions about the Sontec builds, prices etc...
And you were a little shoked about the overall costs of a Sontec 8....
 
It took me only five years, but finally here it is:

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jensenmann said:
It took me only five years, but finally here it is:

normal_000_0548.JPG

Hurray!!!! Happy to see it here. Sonic impressions? ;)
dandeurloo said:
nice!  I just ordered a pair.  Hopefully it wont take as long to build but who knows.

Dan: don't mess Sontec 8 and stereo unit with MS ;)
 
We compared it to a real MEP250C and MES462 here: http://www.24-96.com/ . My version (everything OPA604/2604) has not the soft tone of a 250C but comes sonically very close to the MES462. The famous high shelv does it´s magic thing, though. The original 250 high shelv goes a bit higher in frequency and is a bit more "invisible". My Sontec has a tiny tiny little bit more controlled lowend. All in all it´s an impressive precision tool. Well done, Igor!!!
 
just for the record a bump for this thread: some years later I ripped my Sontec clone apart and changed a few things. The reason is that over time it turned out that the high band didn´t sound as good as the original 250 HF band and the general boxtone is not as pleasing and soft as I know it from original Sontecs. I had a bunch of originals on my bench in the meantime, with enough time to compare and play with them next to another. That made the difference too obvious. So I though that there´s some potential for improvement.
What I found is:
I´ve installed a smaller filtercap in the HF band because it pulled up some gritty frequencies when pushed at it´s highest position.
Using polystyrene filter caps helped to come closer to the original boxtone, too.
A bunch of electrolytics and film caps have been replaced with tantals, like in the original 250. That softened the sound a bit in a good way.
I did an extensive comparison of opamps in the circuit. It turned out that changing the servo or filter opamps didn´t change anything. But the input and summing opamps, being OPA604 in Igor´s design, made a difference. I decided to use LT1007 here. They sounded more natural, more relaxt and less aggressive. They run on +/-22V, so the PSU hat to be adjusted.

 
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