Diy mic pre's

[dwstanford]

Does anyone have any experience with any of the diy mic pre kits out there, i.e. 51x, five fish, seventh circle, classic api, paia, etc.

I'm looking into building a 51x rack or buying an api lunchbox and possibly starting off with a couple of classic api vP26's. 

Has anyone tried to build one of these or anything from another source.

[TheCobbenator]

+1. A buddy of mine is working on a studio and asked me to build him some. Would love to hear a little feedback from someone who has tried it.

[jkokura]

I'd actually like to go a step further and design my own PCBs for these kinds of projects, but the hard part is finding good schematics to work from, and the right parts for my Eagle Library.

I find that most of the expense in these DIY mic pre's are the inflation of the kits and the costs of the PCBs. It's the same with the stuff from BYOC. We all know we can do our own PCBs and source our own parts and build the exact same kit the way we want to for much less than the cost of the kit from BYOC, but for someone beginning who has no idea how to do all that a BYOC kit is money in the bank! I always recommend nervous beginners to try that out before learning to source their own parts. It's way easier that way. But, when you get into doing this, I can build stuff that they charge 100 bucks for, for a mere 25 or 30 bucks before my labour - and most of that is hardware, not the PCB or electronics.

Jacob

[dwstanford]

Yeah, i've noticed the kits could be sourced for much cheaper just by using mouser and other sites.  One site was charging 25 bucks for four gain matched FET's that they probably paid a nickel for.  But if you're building transformer based pre's like neves and api's, you definitely don't want to skimp on the transformers.  Just like with guitar amps.  But there are alot of great sources for transformers also.  With a little research, you could realistically hundreds of dollars. 

[jtn191]

yeah I've been interested in this too. In addition to what's been said--with kits, I think you're paying the convenience of having everything right there, the nice looking chassis, and power supply