Talk about your 800lb Gorilla 
That is hella nice.
Is is nice that you get to work at a DIY high-end audiophile speaker manufacture? Every time Danny comes up with something new and exciting the employees be like yes ill take that. lol. And all those parts to check out lust over.
Good on you Hobbs.
To some extent? But it's actually been a learning experience more than anything. Getting to play with high end hardware, amps, DACs, cables etc. is fun, but it helps me understand the things Danny, Ron and others talk about beyond just a conceptual level. I can see how changing cables on a DAC alone can help/hurt, how tubes affect the sound/tone. Differences between OB/sealed/horn speakers.
There are times when Danny is testing a speaker and I'm starting to pick out when a tweeter or woofer sounds odd.
And all that knowledge helps me relay that information back to customers based on my experience.
I've also had these parts set aside for probably close to 5-6 weeks now waiting for Danny to tally up my total since I was piece-mealing it together rather than just getting a standard kit, so there's quite a few other kits that got foil inductors long before I did. lol
That said I did also get one of the early samples of the new 10W chip amps, just need to get a battery and charger to power it. We've had one of them playing in-house for a few days now and it honestly sounds fantastic, incredibly clean and detailed with excellent bass control. It's one of the few things Danny has said are one of the best sounding devices, esp for "right out of the box." I'll be pairing it with My Studios for sure.
Not quite sure on the release date for those yet, but I believe we just gave to go ahead for making the remaining models.. should be about 25-30 units available once we're ready to release them.
I'm still learning about such matters, but is the bypass cap still necessary when the primary cap is of equal or greater quality? I am of course referring to that beer can in your network. When I did my Otica build, I opted to upgrade the mid circuit to soniccaps, which had a small bypass cap on the base kit. Did I even need to include that tiny cap?
The bypass cap is intended to act like a siphon, allowing the larger cap to discharge much faster. By design, most copper caps are fairly slow to discharge due to the limitations of the materials, and without a bypass, it will tend to smear the details. And keeping the brands/type the same allows them to keep their tonal quality while also increasing the speed of the cap.
Sonicaps are really fast discharging caps, but adding a copper bypass imparts the tonality of a copper cap, leading to a more warm/rich tone.
The real drawback tho, is the amount of burn-in they require, often 400+ hrs before they settle into their final sound. When they're not ready, they often sound really hard, if not harsh.. Most of the dramatic changes will occur within the first week, with them slowly opening up and relaxing the remaining time.
According to some, as you feed them higher quality music or give them a cleaner signal from a bette qualityr front-end, the more they will continue to open up.
As for your bypass caps, yes. Both the base model and upgraded model have bypass caps included in that circuit, as it still helps them to discharge faster than they would on their own, esp once you start getting into those really large values. On smaller values like say 1-7uF its not going to be as necessary, unless there is a tonality you want them to have ontop of their speed.
