Are DIY projects more truer to the original design than mass produced clones?

[Matt Syson]

There are a lot of different versions of 'best'. A major problem with people chosing gear by reading about it on the internet is that you have no idea which aspects of any given piece of gear is actually relevant. For a touring musician that has to lug their own gear around and insufficient cash for dedicated roadies and continual maintenance it is the ability of gear to withstand being thrown around and still work whenever it is plugged in for a gig that is most important. There are often many subtle design considerations that make gear reliable (or not!) that people who simply copy may not appreciate.

 

[JohnRoberts]

There are a lot of different versions of 'best'. A major problem with people chosing gear by reading about it on the internet is that you have no idea which aspects of any given piece of gear is actually relevant. For a touring musician that has to lug their own gear around and insufficient cash for dedicated roadies and continual maintenance it is the ability of gear to withstand being thrown around and still work whenever it is plugged in for a gig that is most important. There are often many subtle design considerations that make gear reliable (or not!) that people who simply copy may not appreciate.

That was a constant tension in design of products for consumers. They generally don't like to pay for things that they cannot see at point of sale (like serviceability, reliability, etc).

I recall the difficulty my loudspeaker product manager had marketing Peavey's replaceable speaker baskets. This is a valuable feature to a customer with a broken speaker, but not so good sounding to somebody pondering a brand new speaker purchase.

JR

 

[Gavin Pursinger]

My builds were fun(?)...and. I have learned alot about it
Nothing so far has been a clone but I am working on an am864 build currently and already I have had to use plan B faceplate and my power train uses an on hand ptx and a bridge...vdc is very close w/out the tubes in...for me this is a challenging build. I expect to have to futz around when assembled...but I am being careful and trying to make it look clean. I am NOT building these things to save $. I luv the sweet sound of success ;-)
Thx for all the info this site provides...

 

[thelivingroom]

I accidentally got into DIY and this site when I wanted a second 1176. It wasn’t because I thought I could do it better than a company, although after hearing how terrible a friend’s KT 1176 sounds I do think there’s some truth to that. I had lost my oilfield job and decided to go for recording full time, so funds were harder to come by than before. I loved my Purple MC77, but couldn’t afford another one at the time, so I was considering a Warm Audio when they came out. I just couldn’t do it. This may sound silly, but I hated the logo and the company name haha. I came across the G1176 and mnats projects in here, but didn’t have the confidence or experience to tackle those. Then I came across the Hairball kits using the mnats boards and that was perfect for me. It had no dumb logos or text all over it, and the build guide was very informative for a DIY newbie. I opted for the version where I sourced the pcb parts to at least gain some experience in that aspect. It came out great and I learned a lot, including things like how to calibrate it. I was hooked, and a few months later sold something to build a second. Now I’ve built several things that sound great and I’m very proud of, and it mostly boils down to finances for me. I could never justify buying an LA2A reissue for $4,700 when I can build a D-LA2A full of great parts for less than half of that. It has also given me way more confidence to rebuild and recalibrate some of my more “vintage” pieces, including keys, amps, power supplies, and over the Covid lockdown my entire console that was full of over 7,000 capacitors.

 

[pucho812]

One thing to think about is that the originals were also mass produced. Their parts were often chosen to meet needs and manufacturing price point.

 

[user 137017]

Comparing my little KLD amp self build kit to the mass produced amps. The kld wins hands down, less than £300 and a few mods ie added a bassman input stage, a couple of heavy duty rotary switches for bass and top boost. Feeding the line out into a stereo mosfet.. simply the best amp ive had in nearly 50 years. Knocks the spots off other amps i have owned in the past. Ive had Orange, Marshall, sound city, wem, selmer and peavy stuff.

Some kits are awesome.

 

[nielsk]

Lifespan (of the gear!) is certainly an area of difference. One battles the bean counter army has won is institutionalizing the now art form of planned obsolescence. Products are intentionally made to be un-serviceable, and to die the day the warranty expires. Yet another piece of crap on the gigantic scrapheap of human waste.
Much of the gear many here have lusted for and got this all going in order to have what they can't afford to buy (or be lucky enough to even have the opportunity) was purposly built to last and be serviceable.
If you build something for yourself let's hope you put it together in a way that is serviceable.
Many of the "clone" manufacture stuff I have seen has no reference designators in the PCB screen print, opaque PCBs, absurdly small traces and component lead holes (or even worse SMT) and forget about ever laying eyes on a schematic, all of which make troubleshooting the simplest of problems way more difficult.

 

[Jeff5]

There's great comments here. For me, it comes down to details. For example, I bought a Lindell la2a clone, and I couldn't build a better one unless I used vintage transformers. It sounds great with nos tubes. So I don't want to diy that.

On the other hand, all of the pultec clones I tried sounded harsh up top, so I built my own, with very nice parts. It's half the cost of a pulse techniques pultec and the only way I could afford that particular sound.

So in some cases diy is essential, and in other situations, maybe a waste of time and resources, unless it's just fun to build stuff.