Caiman Mods

[StanleyB]

I got yours OK, but the Rubycons from HFG didn't make it. Your caps are now happily fitted in my modded TC-7510, where they provide an excellent service.

[HighFidelityGuy]

I got yours OK, but the Rubycons from HFG didn't make it. Your caps are now happily fitted in my modded TC-7510, where they provide an excellent service.

Balls, sorry to hear that Stan. They weren't Rubycon though, just some equivalents I had spare. I'll see if I have any more and I'll send you them if I do.

[StanleyB]

I prefer Rubycons if anyone has 2 pieces spare. I want to do a direct comparison between the passive and active output so that I can eliminate any potential pseudo acoustic effects.
I might ask Jimmy at Tirna for a couple since he has 3K of them...

[Peter Galbavy]

This is a "bypass opamp" mod, yes ?

[NRG]

I've only just caught up with the mods to the Caiman and I've gone in my own direction. The Murata regs look good but I can't justify the cost so I've made do with LT1086 and the Teddy 'Gyrator' made up onto strip board and squeezed into the available space. For the output caps I've not gone with the recommendations and stuck with what I like IE BlackGates. I was happy before the changes but I'm even happier now, the sound has swung more to where my TDA1541 sits, its grown some midrange fullness and importantly revealed a new level of detail retrieval.

The regs seem to have eliminated a HF noise observed on the 'scope and also reduced the switching noise by about 20db, I'm now very tempted to build a simple linear pretracking supply to see if it improves further....

[StanleyB]

I've only just caught up with the mods to the Caiman and I've gone in my own direction. The Murata regs look good but I can't justify the cost so I've made do with LT1086 and the Teddy 'Gyrator' made up onto strip board and squeezed into the available space.

Care to share the knowledge with the rest of us ? A wider choice of upgrade options is bound to go down well.

[NRG]

I'm not sure there's a whole lot to share Stan!

I used the Teddy Gyrator cct and a LT1086-5 and a -12, they just squeezed under the lid. I added some small clip on heat sinks which made fitting even more fiddly. As the pinouts of the LT series are different to the standard 7805/10 I had to juggle the GND and OUT pins...not elegant but it worked. Some not so stellar pics below.

[MartinT]

Nicely done, Neal.

[leo]

Just to add another I knocked up a little adjustable shunt reg which I'm trying for the output stage
The one for the digital is an Audiocom super reg1

[StanleyB]

I'm not sure there's a whole lot to share Stan!

I don't know what others think Neal, but I think that you have done a brilliant job there. Very much in the true spirit of 'more for less' as far as cost is concerned.