> Next stop, design the ultimate box and rule the world!
Not to rain on your reign, but: I been messing with audio, pretty obsessively, for 40 years, don't think I know much, and don't see everybody bowing before me.
(If I seem to know some, it is just many years of narrow-minded experience.)
> thinking this board is full of geniuses if you burn your finger while soldering
I don't bother with those insulated sleeves for paper coffee cups: my fingers are all solder-burns and mere coffee isn't hot. If a genius never gets a solder-burn, then I'm a slime-worm. (I do think it would be smarter to have less burn-scar, but that's the breaks.)
> do these actually sound like the originals or better?
I also don't worship the past. Love it; don't worship it. A lot of old boxes weren't/aren't all that great objectively: but some are euphonic in certain situations. Many of today's $99 boxes at Banjo Center et al really are better than most of the stuff we used in the good old days. (I was just browsing Shure's old spec-sheets and remembering what we worked with.) And I don't see that music has really improved with ready availablity of audio boxes that don't suck. I myself love the boxes anyway; but if there is any world-ruling wealth and power in this racket, it is in the MUSIC, not the equipment.
> I found out that I can actually build my favorite boxes (usual suspects, la2a, gyraf, etc) with all the knowledge on the internet!!! Is it true?
Well, think about it. Where did the "favorite boxes" come from? Handed down from God? Fell off the back of a UFO? 1,000 engineers and techs laboring 20 years on each box? NO! Somebody MADE them, often one person building a one-off and then showing a few workers how to do it again and again. Many were mostly standard parts; a few took advantage of custom transformers and other industries that have vanished since then so you wind up salvaging or adapting. Note that nobody in this business dies (or lives) wealthy and powerful. Who built the LA2a? The 670? The 300B? The C-130? We know a few of their names: fer example, despite selling a fine box to Fairchild and a lot of work at Ampex, Narma still works for a living. In a unique twist of fate, some of the $1/hour workers who assembled 300Bs got re-hired 30 years later to assemble 300Bs again (but this year production shifted from near their homes in Kansas City to Georgia, and probably they didn't move). And Lansing went broke over and over (and lost the right to use his name) and was broke when he died.