good a everyone.

would you mods your amps(such as change burr brown chip, power supply) to improve amps SQ? i have seen some of peoples in singapore did it and that was huge difference from the un-mod amps to moded amp. has anyone experienced or any comments?

PHD

No experience, but back in my country this trend is starting to grow, heck some of them even make a really good amp.

most mods ive read about are only for spl=make more power with no regards to SQ.....

I think that this is far more prevalent in home audio, whereby people replace caps, tubes and all sorts of things to improve the performance sometimes with quite large results.

i thought about doing it, time consuming work to change all the caps and resistors but the benifits can be good.

Unfortunately, its not a simple swap in/out upgrade in most cases. There are many stages in an amp, and upgrading just one will usually NOT impart a noticable SQ difference (upgrade).

Power supplies can be upgraded, input stages (pre-amps) can be upgrade and so can output stages. Therefore, the amp will perform as low as the SQ of the worst of these stages. Improving one of these stages will only allow the amp to perform as good as the 2nd lowest stage's SQ. Modifying all the amp's stages would yield the best result, but in that case, its probably cheaper (and safer) to just buy a better amp from the beginning - you get a proper warranty, and you dont jeopardize the electronics with foreign OpAmps/components.

The guys on this page do alot of modding
www.diyaudio.com theres an actual car audio section
there is one particular mod that is quite popular for the Butler tube amps that is meant to yield excellant results and all they did was change a couple of cheap chips.

Luke

I'v done a lot of mods to my home hifi amplifiers including changing resistors, upgrading preamp and power supply capacitors, upgrading bridge wave rectifier even upgrading the power supplies to toroidal transformers. Thinking of doing some upgrades to my mcintosh if i need to.

another reason for modifying amps is to improve reliability.

i remember ram doing that with the U-Dimension amps that i have in my setup currently.. i was told that in aus, these amps dont have very reliable power supplies, and modifying these areas will increase the reliability.. i've had them running flat stick (under glass) in a box that only has a fan sucking air out and there are no problems..

would be interesting to know others views on this?

AA&T in Perth mod Butler Tubes all the time, with fantastic results. Is it cost effective? Let your ears decide.

i know mods the tube amps can listen the difference. except Bulter tube driver, other amps would improve SQ if we do mods such as change chips? what mods would u do in oyur amp to improve SQ?

replacing transistors, caps (especially ones in the signal chain) and op-amp chips can certainly bring an 'average' amp up to 'fantastic' status.

Modding the amp will sure effect the performance of the amp. It is all depend on what you are doing with it. you may say that an amp sound a bit too energitic ( DLS A8 in my case) What cause that? you will have to cafully figureout the signal path carefully. In mycase I replace the AD712 chip with BB 2134 to make it sound laid back. I replace ELna cap inside to Pnansonis FC for a darker background. So now you decide what U like about your amp and what you don't like about it brfore you make the mod