Bottlehead Crack W Speed Balling
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Bottlehead Crack with Upgrades Built by me 2 years ago, I have used high quality parts and all available upgrades. - Speed-Ball Upgrade. Aug 11, 2013 Crack;Bottlehead OTL. Macbook> Geek Pulse X >Bottlehead Crack w. For those interested in a decent dremel set i found a pretty good deal on a variable speed. The Bottlehead Crack is a DIY kit sold by Bottlehead in. The Bottlehead Crack. This weekend buy it & get the speed ball free and if you ask me that.
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Fairly detailed, can be a bit bright but can be tweaked with tubes (or even LISST work well there). Staging width is ok, but not very deep. Valhalla 2: A very light and airy presentation, great for the price. Stock tubes can give a little bit of fatigue up top over time, but not as much as stock tubes with Mjolnir 2. Excellent for the price, but only does staging better than Mjolnir 2 IMO. Eddie Current Zana Deux: Very wide and deep staging, jaw dropping in fact, especially coming from Mjo2.
Good bass depth and presence, but slam not at Mjo2 levels. Very resolving, and a very smooth but not rolled off top end Bonus 4th LH Labs GOV2+: Shockingly good for what it is, punchy bass, non-annoyting top end. I wouldn't make it a permanent solution for the 800, but it does the job when called for.
OT vs OTL Both me and Lieven love output transformer-less amps, often known as OTL amps. On amplifier with output transformers (OTs), the transformer at the output end of your amplifier is often likened to having an extremely and excessively long headphone cable to connect your headphone to your amp. We all know that the longer the path that the signal has to travel, the greater the degradation (imagine the length of the wire needed to build one transformer). This is why good output transformers are extremely expensive (think thousands of dollars for top grade OTs), because they are extremely crucial to the overall sound quality. Despite their limitations, short signal paths and simple designs tend to be very good at things like soundstage and three dimensionality. Even with high end output transformers, it’s still an extremely long signal path, and an OTL design is always going to yield a cleaner sound. Of course, the limitations of OTL amps are their low power output, and with speakers that’s always a problem because people want to drive big speakers to fill up big rooms.
But with headphones, especially high impedance headphones like the Senns, OTL designs produce plenty of power. The Perfect Amp for the 300Ω Senns In the past, people tend to say that the 300Ω Senns and the 600Ω Beyers are extremely difficult to drive and that they require high power amps to shine. I don’t think this is true. Yes if you’re trying to drive them from your portable devices which only goes so loud. But pair them with a simple Cmoy amp, and you realize that these headphones are very easy to drive (high impedance headphones need high gain, and high gain is easy to achieve.
Low impedance headphones need high current, and that’s more difficult to do properly). The Crack is an OTL design, and me and L had high hopes for it for our Senns. I was not disappointed.
With both the HD650 and the HD800, the Crack delivers one of the cleanest sound, the blackest background, the widest and deepest soundstage I’ve heard on any amp below the $1K mark. Yes, that includes the famous WooAudio WA6 or its SE variant. Of course, the Crack probably can’t handle low impedance headphones as well as the OT-equipped WA6 or WA6SE, but that was never the design objective with the Crack anyway. In a way the Crack is similar to the $2,300 Zana Deux amp, being both of OTL designs and relatively limited to high impedance Senns (though both the Crack and the Zana also very well with Grados). They can’t handle the big heavy orthodynamics, but pair them with Senns and you’ve got a combo that’s really hard to beat. The Crack sounds extremely clean that it’s just sublime to listen to the HD800 through it. It’s cleaner than any solid state amp I know, and being tube-based, it has that liquid smooth sound that you just can’t get with solid state.
One of my reservations with the WooAudio 6 is that despite its very smooth sound, the soundstage only goes wide but has very little depth. The Crack is slightly less wide than the Woo 6, but it’s depth is far superior, resulting in the best three dimensionality I’ve heard under $1,000. The background is very black, every instruments very distinct. Excellent dynamics, though a bit short on the micro details. The Crack doesn’t stop there. It takes that superb technicalities and combine it with a mildly dark, full mids and full lows sound signature, and I think I’ve just found one of the best amps for the Sennheiser HD600/650/800 series.
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And I’m only listening to the stock build version with no boutique parts or Speedball upgrades. My friend Drew, on the other hand, builds his Crack with premium parts, a DACT stepped attenuator, complete with the Speedball upgrade and some really fancy tubes. I don’t think I want to listen to it. I enjoy my Crack just as it is, and I don’t want to be tempted. Other Headphone Pairings What else can I say? The Crack is also beautiful with AKG’s K550, Alessandro’s MS-Pro, Sennheiser HD598, and ATH’s M-50.
So I don’t think you have to be paranoid with low impedance cans, as long as they are dynamic drivers with relatively high efficiency. It doesn’t drive any of the Hifiman orthodynamics I tried it with (HE-400, HE-500, HE-6). Well it does to some moderately low volume level, any higher and distortions will come. It’s also beautiful with IEMs, provided you don’t listen at low volume levels because the gain level is quite high on this amp. I enjoy my Shure SE215 with it.
I think the micro dynamic driver on the Shure is one of the most resolving drivers around, and when you pair it with something so clean and spacious like the Crack, you get pure bliss. With something like an Etymotics ER4-S and a good high quality recording and DAC, I don’t even want to tell you how it’s going to sound. End Words With the recent price increase, and even if you pay Bottlehead to build one for you, I think the price is still relatively good. In fact I don’t think you can find an amp with a better technicality than the Crack for less than $500. If you build one yourself, that means only $279, and the Crack is a steal for that price.
If you happened to order the amp before the price increase (like me and L did, plus the 10% bulk-buy discount), consider you’re practically robbing Bottlehead for the sound that you get. I had said before that I found the K550 to be just a tad analytical sounding. After spending more time with it, I don’t think that is the case anymore. It might be burn in, but more then likely, I am just getting used to the sound. I had planned on getting a MS2+ to go with it, but I am starting to think that the dacport LX would match the sound of the K550 better (I would love to hear your thoughts on that, yes, this post does relate to the crack, i just believe in a good origin story). I was going to pair them with the asgard, but it is hard not to notice the way you rave about the crack. You had mentioned somewhere, that there was some noise when the K550 and the crack were paired but it was very minor.
That is a bit of a concern to me because on some of my classical (MN orchestra’s Beethoven’s 7th per instance), the dynamic range is INSANE, and is frequently almost whisper quiet. If there is any noise, it will be heard. Do you have any thoughts? Would the crack still work, or would I be better with the asgard (or something)? Man, all these awesome reviews coming in, it is paradise in headfonia. Chris, Checking for shorts, the easiest way is to inspect visually. If you see metal or solder tin touching, or very close, you can take a multimeter, switch to continuity tester and test if the two points are indeed shorted.
Switching polarity of the diodes and caps, this is why after doing a few solder points, I always go back and double check things. On the diodes and caps, I think I re-checked their polarity orientation a million times. 😉 The best way to do the assembly is to do it very slowly. Fast assembly in my experience is very prone to errors, and troubleshooting would take much longer than the time you save. I find their stuff to be good, but overpriced. You can get something equivalent that doesn’t need to be built, isn’t just a plate that sits on an open box, doesn’t take 2 months to arrive, and quite frankly is better looking for around the same price or less. You aren’t getting a nice headphone jack nor potentiometer and knob.
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The tube sockets aren’t that great. Slotted hardware is just blah.
The placement of the power switch makes me reach past the tubes, hence I burn my arms on the tubes. The transformer bell end cover isn’t coated with anything and gets hot, so it rusts. The only thing that prevents a person from making this kit themselves is that the power transformer is custom-wound by some manufacturer. I still doubt that with the numbers they’re getting that they cost a lot. Their Speedball is really way over-priced. $125 for a few PCBs, a few transistors, a few resistors, a few LEDs, some heat sinks and mounting kits, and standoffs and screws I could build and sell the same thing with a better PCB design for $50 and still make plenty of profitand not have it take 2 months to arrive.
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If a friend asked me if they should buy one, I would tell them no, and I would just offer to make them one for much less than they could buy it, including the labor. It wouldn’t be too hard to figure out the power transformer issue.