Since Kevin has announced the availablilty of the Chazz Headphone Amp, I thought I'd share some more with all of you.
I've had the pleasure of listening to Chazz for about a month now since I built one of the first kits in order to produce the instruction manual that you all will be using.
Chazz is a relatively easy build, it's all point-to-point wiring which is made easier by the use of terminal strips to which most of the major components are attached. Construction entails wiring the power supply, wiring of the output transformers and then wiring of the passive components associated with each tube. I would estimate a person experienced in electronic contsruction could build Chazz in about eight hours. The large chassis and the use of the terminal strips to hold the passive components makes this unit a tweaker's delight. Wait till you get a load of the serious iron that is under that transformer cover. The output transformers are as large as the ones on Ella!
If you haven't seen it yet, check our Srajan Ebaens glowing review of Chazz at
http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/diycable/chazz.html">6 Mooons. I don't have a pair of AKG K1000's but I do have a pair of Sennheiser HD600's as well as AKG 301's and Sennheiser HD 280 Pro's. Chazz can drive them all. I agree with much of what Srajan says about the sound of Chazz, although I didn't find the difference between 6550's and KT88's as pronounced as he did. I agree with him that the soundstage is wider in ultralinear mode, but triode mode is very nice as well.
When Srajan gets around to rolling tubes into Chazz he's gonna find that a NOS RCA 5V4 adds a little punch to the bass and a NOS 6SN7 (mine's a Ratheon 6SN7GTB) makes the mids just a tad sweeter. Becasue I built the stock kit so that the pictures in the manual would portray the unit out of the box, I haven't had any experience with the DACT attenuator or other tweaks, but I hope to get to that in time.
The most important aspect of construction is to pay attention to the routing of the wires in order to keep noise down. Notice how the wires in the photo below are routed into a large group that crosses the center of the chassis and then travel downward along four "vias" between the tube sockets. My unit constructed as shown measured at less than 0.3mV of noise! With no signal and the volume cranked up all the way, Chazz is absolutely dead quiet.
I've built the Morgan Jones headphone amp from the Headwize site as well as several of CMoy's Pocket Headphone Amps. Chazz is in a whole other category and I would guess it competes very well with other commercial headphone amps. You folks are gonna love this one not only becasue it's a first-rate product, but also because Brian and Kevin are there for support should you encounter problems.
Pictured below is the latest iteration of Chazz with the black transformer cover and a pic of the underbelly of Chazz. Enjoy!
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