Hi Morten,
I have been living happily with the ldr v3 for a few months not. It gets gets out of the way and now with further tweaks am I glad that it is the best my system ever sounded. A big thank you.
Thanks. Just to clarify for readers, justubes is using a pair of DIY LR3x.V2.1 boards in a balanced audio configuration.
I have an issue is that mute still allows some sound through 1 channel, is this because of faulty ldrs, autocal doesnt take it away.
There's always some leak-through of sound during mute when the input is tied directly to the preamp board and there isn't an input relay board to absolutely shut off the input. This tends to be a bit more noticeable with balanced configurations due to the +6 dB associated with balanced signals. Auto-cal is unlikely going to change this much if any.
It's always possible that if one LDR goes wonky this could be exacerbated but the most likely symptom of a bad LDR is a noticeable shift in channel balance during normal listening.
Also as for the replacement, have you found the Advance photonix better than the silonex branded ldrs? Im sure different brands may sound alittle different.
Some time ago Advanced Photonix bought Silonex so while the name has changed the specific LDR design/model has not. To my knowledge no other LDR comes close to meeting the specs of the Silonex. I've tried a couple of Chinese LDRs mostly out of curiosity but they can't meet the 100 ohm to 100k ohm range of the Silonex and require much higher currents. I never got far enough to actually listen to them because their specs were so off relative to our current design.
One thing I can say is that while Silonex was accessible and published a fair bit of info on their audio LDRs, Advanced Photonix is quite murky with next to no product or application info available online.
UPDATE: Just found out that Advanced Photonix merged with Luna Innovations back in May. My hunch is Advanced Photonix acquired Silonex so they could turn around and sell/merge. Basically an M&A play where senior management makes big $$ and everyone else is more or less confused.
