Expensive upgrades or SO

[Latteman]

https://sparkoslabs.com/product/ss78xx- ... regulator/

Cheers peter

[Daniel Quinn]

I hardly call it expensive.

So the question would be is regulation neccesary and deos it effect the sound.

Each rail of my amps get 43.6 v. It doesn't seem to fluctuate. Any fluctuation will thus be 100s of a volt. I personally don't worry about such figures.

[Latteman]

Don't fit them to NVA. It neither needs it, or wants it.

[Latteman]

Not going to- just interested as it popped up on Facebook

[Geoff.R.G]

The data sheet suggests that one of these can replace the LM317 (positive) or LM337 (negative) regulator. I have so far had only one problem with an LM317 in an audio circuit, it behaved as designed and shut down when it got too hot. That happened because the heat sink fell off (push on type). Given that an LM317 costs around 10p I would expect a lot from a $47 regulator.

[slinger]

Don't fit them to NVA. It neither needs it, or wants it.

That is almost exactly what The Doc said to me when I mentioned putting regulators on the front ends of my nva boards. Well I did it anyway Partly out of curiosity and partly because I have been told not to bother with certain things before and it turned out I preferred it (sometimes a lot) with the change carried out (against advice).

The other thing is my transformers were custom made by Canterbury windings (at great expense) for diy Avondale voyager amps which have a regulator on the front end and so they need higher voltage secondary windings for the front end to account for regulator dropout. I wanted to use these transformers for my nva boards but the voltage is too high for the front end (60V). So I was forced to use regs on the front ends to drop voltage if nothing else.

The regs I used were Avondale HCR200 at over £300 a pair basically cos i already had them. They can do high current as well so can regulate the output stage as well but I never tried that and won't be . So how do nva amp boards sound with the input stage regulated ? Bloody good but then I would say that. I am yet to try other regs but do have the parts to replicate the very simple regs found in the nva phono stages. I could do no regs at all and compare but that is for another day (and a few more transformers).