Gator mods

[HighFidelityGuy]

Due to all the recent snow my Gator is currently gathering dust somewhere in the Royal Mail delivery non-delivery system. So my imagination has started to get the better of me. I've noticed that the Gator has several electrolytic caps and I was wondering how many of these were in the signal path and whether it would be technically possible to swap these for fancy polypropylene caps? Obviously I'm not going to go rushing into making any changes any time soon as I want to fully evaluate the Gator in it's stock state but I just wanted to get the ball rolling....

Cheers. :cool:

[DSJR]

You people just can't help yourselves can you :D

FFS, leave the bloomin' thing alone for at least six months until you're used to the effect a proper driver/output stage does for your DAC. I believe Stan selected the caps used himself in any case...

[leo]

Just don't forget to post some opinions first to give Stan a little feedback for the stock Gator :)

[HighFidelityGuy]

Don't worry, as I said I don't intend to make any changes for quite a while. I have plenty of other projects to work on while I familiarise my self with the stock Gator. I just like to plan well ahead.

So can anyone shed any light on which caps could be swapped for polyprops? :eyebrows:

[Reid Malenfant]

So can anyone shed any light on which caps could be swapped for polyprops? :eyebrows:
Not without a circuit diagram no ;)

There are an awful lot of caps on the board for such a simple circuit, i hope no more than 4 of them are carrying audio. 2 input caps & 2 output for DC isolation purposes ;)

[HighFidelityGuy]

My Gator arrived yesturday and based on a quick look at the layout it seems like there are 2 input caps and 2 otput caps, both 47uF bipolar electrolytics. So I'm guessing either the input caps, or the output caps, or all 4 could be swapped for polyprop's? If that's the case then I might do some experimenting next year to see if any improvements can be gained.

[StanleyB]

You can of course try experimenting with even more expensive transistors ;)? Both Leo and me used whatever we had in our transistor collection, and neither of us have experimented with anything else. But you'll need a fair bit of knowledge about tranny biasing etc. before taking on that type of mod.

[HighFidelityGuy]

You can of course try experimenting with even more expensive transistors ;)? Both Leo and me used whatever we had in our transistor collection, and neither of us have experimented with anything else. But you'll need a fair bit of knowledge about tranny biasing etc. before taking on that type of mod.

I did wonder if that would be possible but I don't know enough on the subject to experiment with that. I'd need someone to tell me what componets need swapping to what values etc. I do have some 2SK170-BL jfets that I was going to use in a B1 buffer, so I don't know if they would be compatible or any better? It's not something I'd look at doing any time soon though. ;)

[StanleyB]

Well, let's wait and see which other DAC on the market can beat the Caiman/Gator combination before tinkering with tranny changes. Collectively we have tried just about every respectable opamp on the market, but the Gator discrete stage has outperformed all of them. So we have some breathing space for a while ;).

[HighFidelityGuy]

Sounds good to me. I'm looking forward to sitting back and enjoying the Gator goodness over Christmas. I think it's going to be a good one this year. :cool: