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[antiguru]

hi,
 I'm looking to keep my tech skills up to snuff.  As such, I'm trying to find out about cheap gear that can be modded into great, or at least nice sounding gear as projects to keep myself busy on days off.

one example would be the alesis 3630 compressor where you can buy a kit to seriously upgrade the sound, as well as cutting out one of the poorer-performing circuits (two cut mod, detailed in tape-op a couple issues ago)

Another would be the focusrite Eureka, where the IC chips can be swapped out with much nicer sounding ones fairly easily (also detailed in tape-op).

Anyone know of any others?


Thanks!

[bounce]

Search homrecording.com for the behringer ecm8000 mic, the mxl 603, and oktava o12 mic mods. Also you may want to pick up some yamaha pm1000 channel strips on ebay and rack them up. They sound huge!

mckay

[doc willie]

The Symetrix 202 pre-amp is minimaly decent, and can be modded into a great pre-amp. There is a paper with about 13 pages of mods to do, starting with the op-amps and a couple of major capacitors. From there you can go further with other components, grounding issues, etc.  

Someone else makes a circuit board to replace the whole works. But then it isn't really a Symetrix anymore.

[boogalaboogala]

I just read in another forum about a mod for the Bellari RP503 Tube Channel.

Buy the Bellari ($169 before tax is the best I've seen), which sounds shite, from some opinions.  Pop her open and replace the opamps with TI Burr-Brown OPA2604 chips ($8.50 -- You cannot get these as free samples anymore from the TI website, by the way).  Then, replace the stock tube with a NOS Telefunken 12AU7 or something equally quiet.

The claim is that you'll end up with a full plate voltage tube mic pre that sounds more like $1000 (their claim, not mine).  You can find some details at www.blacklionaudio.com .  I intend to give it a whirl for around $200.

Boog.