my point is that to even start going down the road of trying to justify ridiculous wire and components, you’d have to spend several thousands of dollars on ridiculous audiophile equipment and interconnects to even *think* about claiming superior audio “tone” or “dynamics” based solely on wire selection, all the while not having any shielding for your inputs as shown in the photos of this build. and that isn’t even touching on the issue of speakers and then speaker cables. if you have anything less than insanity throughout, your insanity in your component selection for one part of the signal chain is obviated.

will i say that certain signal paths sound better than others…absolutely. i put a mcintosh c28 in front of a tube headphone amplifier i built and it sounded like god compared to the tube pre i built. there was definite difference. this was coming out of an echo sound card though, with 320kb/s aac files playing. my shitty mp3s still sounded shitty though, and just as bad. and it wouldn’t have mattered if i used monster cables or the cables i made.

That’s an obscure form of transformer too. I want to role it in dough and deep fry it.

#11 The LM3875 chip can supply about 50W/channel.

#12 You can see gold is not the best conductor. The reason is it popular for connections is that it does not oxidize or tarnish like copper or silver. Snake oil products can be used to change the sound. Good on some systems, bad on others. Tinned copper should me good enough.

Grounding is very important. An external power supply is ideal.

For those who are not familiar with a gainclone, they are simple to build at a very reasonable cost and they sound very good. The chips are about $4 each.

as far as exotic materials for build, fabienne is absolutely right; i’ve heard systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and they’re by and large boring sounding unless you’re listening to diana krall or kenny g. there’s absolutely no need for pure silver wire and ridiculous cable unless you have the sound source that will utilize it, a circuit design that will utilize it, and speakers that will be able to project said difference. Then you have a system that’s great for listening to shitty jazz while sipping wine and appearing rather pretentious. solid solder joints, effective grounding, and reasonable parts selection are what’s important.

As for why this thing has to be “mass loaded” to keep vibration down – when doing a solid state amp I haven’t a clue.