Welcome To Soma

This one was a LONG time in the making. The case is cherry, the face plate and knobs are copper. The left knob is input select, center volume, and the right knob is a rotary dimmer switch for the backlight on the volume knob (which is backlit with _incandescent_ bulbs.) Sounds absolutely beautiful, looks just as good, with more coats of polyurethane than I kept track of! Thanks to all of the people at diyaudio.com, especially BrianGT, who made the PCB boards I used. The boards can now be purchased at www.chipamp.com. Also many thanks to my landlord Steve, who supplied me with tools and the knowledge to use them.

I was going to build a passive preamp inside of a sunglasses container with one of those headphone amps alongside, but ended up making a powered preamp using nearly the same circuit as the previous projects. It works nice, I had to add the input resistors connected to ground on the dvd input to tone down the incoming signal a bit so it wouldn't get amplified into clipping and distortion. I checked this piece further using a scope and it checks out nice, no clipping and the input/output resistances are good (100k in, theoretical 0 out.)

The second iteration of the headphone amp was the same internal design, packed into a slightly smaller, sleeker container. This one has a much more solid feel to it, and is what I will use provided I ever get a nice pair of headphones that will require it.