Once upon a time on usenet Woody wrote:
"Iain" wrote in message
...
torstai 26. lokakuuta 2017 14.03.04 UTC+3 Jim Lesurf kirjoitti:
In article , Adrian Caspersz
wrote:

I was leafing through an old 1980 copy of Hifi News and Record
Review,
marvelling at the amount of constructional projects in that mag.
Wow and
tears that that general interest doesn't exist anymore.

You may be right. However I keep wondering if the problem is the
lack of
either items which would draw people into DIY and/or that people
who'd like
it don't bother to tell editors so.

Are there any modern audio products available in kit form other than
speakers?

I think that the fairly recent surge of interest in valve amps, killed
off by cheap Chinese amplifiers with poor sound but fascinating
pyrotechnics, was partly due to the fact that some people wanted to
get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, even if only by
adjusting the cathode bias:-)

Many tube/valve amps are wired point to point, so that the owner has
little difficulty in replacing say the original cathode resistor with
a low noise, 1% component, and enjoy the subsequent improvement which
even the milkman commented upon:-)

It is probably the DIY bug in people that make them want to try exotic
high-price speaker cables, and screened mains cables. This is
probably the closest that many can get to building anything.

There used to be an excellent mag called "Elektor" published in German
and English. I wonder if it is still going?

Iain


IMSMC Elecktor was of Dutch origin but sadly doesn't seem to be around
any more although I still have some back copies form the 80's and
90's! They had some VERY good but relatively simple designs - things
like MOSFETs etc - and even made PCBs available for home building.

That and those designed by such as Doug Self and most of all by the
great John Lindsey-Hood were what it was all about. I taught my wife
(then girlfriend) and her sister to solder and we built one of the JLH
intergrated 50W (or was it 75W?) per channel amps from a kit from Hart
Electronics at Oswestry - and at coming up 92 my father-in-law is
still using it today.

Them were't days tha' knows.............

https://www.elektor.com/

The magazine is still being published. I've been reading it for quite a
while now.
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)