FEELER - Solid-state microphone upgrade boards (OpAmp, JFET, U87A, FET847, ORS87-Plus)

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Apologies for the delay, but i have updates! Or, well, at least one, anyway 😁

In-between getting acquainted to living in my own house, i finally managed to eek out some time to populate a first board from this load - a cardioid-only OpAlice.

After a quick capsule-less test to sanity-check the supply voltages (and promptly discovering the brainfart of having installed the opamp the wrong way around - yes, happens to the best of us 🙈 ), getting a bit over 39v at XLR pins2/3, which points towards ~2.6mA total current draw, using an OPA2991. Provisionally, i decided to bypass all the tone-shaping features, to only leave the bare minimum to troubleshoot, if needed.

Stuck the board into an already-slightly-modded Neewer NW700, and instantly noted a couple issues.

OpAlice_card_1.jpg

One is that, having placed the mounting holes so that the top edge of the boards goes right up to the bottom of the headbasket, it won't sit flush, due to to the macgyvering i needed to do, to fasten an LDC mount to the base plate. Which involved a bunch of moderately-sized washers... Oh well, i'll see about including a notch of some sort in that area.

OpAlice_card_2.jpg

Second, as i had stuck a 1/2" wide strip of rubber to the inside of the body tube (to quell down resonances) some time ago, i was slightly disappointed to discover the board's a bit too wide to fit inside the smaller inside-diameter of the rubber strip. Not much i can do about that, without sacrificing MXL2001 chassis compatibility. But perhaps if i taper down the board width just below the 2001 mounting holes... :unsure:

But hey, that's what prototypes are for, right? Proof-of-concept and all that... 😅

No extraneous noise upon a brief test, but then again, my chaotic work-room is far from a testbed for noise. But it works! (y) Capsule ends up seeing about 20v across it, so especially since it's a straight buffer (no gain), this won't be the most sensitive thing out there, but that's not the worst thing for drums and such, right?
 
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That'a a hefty capsule mount you have there.
Or you took LARGE in LDC too seriously.

Prototyping is not for the weak!

Go big or go home 😎😁

Yeah, at the time (when i installed this particular capsule in this mic), the only M3 bolt i had, with a low-enough-profile head to fit inside the counterbore in the capsule mount, was THAT long. Big spring washers because that was the one way to "make up" threaded length. Don't ask, i just grabbed what i had at hand to get it done THEN 😆
 

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Watching this with great interest @Khron , like many others. Very interested to learn how you will price your work. The ‘Jules/Homero’ JLI boards (which I note have been copied by the Chinese on Ali, tut tut..) are expensive once you add shipping to the UK and seem to have potential for RF layout issues (maybe?), so potentially very interested!
 

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