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Posted
60dB if your lucky, channel matching is totally conditional on how well the parts are hand-matched

not really luck, just buy 500 of them..

Optocoupler-Matching.jpg

also, most system problems are easily alleviated with a simple buffer, if you have to be able to support every possible equipment chain out there...

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Posted
60dB if your lucky, channel matching is totally conditional on how well the parts are hand-matched.

LDR's sound great, but they are fiddly as hell and probably require better system matching than most people will do. Melos used hand-selected parts for their success. The photentiometer used a full-on automotive dome-light bulb for light source: it could be replaced with an LED sure, but it would still be drawing tons of current to get a high attenuation.

i'll stick with my 110dB attenuation. 60dB, 70dB attenuation, those are listening levels with some IEMs and some source output levels.

Posted
LDR's suck when it comes to stability WRT temperature.

Anyone that has ever had to fix a marantz 10B would know this.

Bad idea for portables.

Thank god there are other devices available now that weren't produced 45 years ago.

Posted

The things in the melos drifted more than 1db just by waving paper over them.

The temp curves of the photodiode and led would have to match extremely

well to make this work. Since the two are completely different semiconductor

processes, this is almost impossible.

Posted
Me as well.

It almost makes sense to make a portable amp without a volume control because they are going to be used with a portable device that already has a volume control.

Posted

Damn, that is sweet. I might buy one just to look at it, since I prefer using my IEMs directly from my DAP. Which kinda leads me to ask, is the market for IEM-oriented amps really that big? Not sure I get why so many people bother amping their IEMs.

Posted
Damn, that is sweet. I might buy one just to look at it, since I prefer using my IEMs directly from my DAP. Which kinda leads me to ask, is the market for IEM-oriented amps really that big? Not sure I get why so many people bother amping their IEMs.

It has as much power as most other lithium powered amps. The 'regular' Pico runs on a 2-cell, 8.4V battery, but that's unusual. So, its not specifically for IEMs, but if it can be the first choice of anyone with IEMs, I think I can live with that. A lot of the idea of this amp is to make a portable for people who aren't interested in portables because they are too bulky and offer little or no improvement. This solves those problems by being thin and offering a range of volume adjustment and precision left/right matching that you can't get from a DAP. Also, some IEMs like the Livewires and Westone ES3X are unusable from many DAPs/phones due to the amount of hiss from their headphone jacks.

Posted

If as Wikipedia says, a US quarter coin is 24.26mm in diameter, then using the mathematical exactitude of guesswork in shrink % and holding a ruler up to my monitor this is the actual size of the unit:

Pico-Slim_Actual-Size_A.jpg

Which is this_is_madness.jpg

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