Just showing off my Eros 2! I finished Friday night, and spent the weekend spinning records late enough to screw my sleep schedule up worse than COVID already had. I am upgrading from a Hagertech Bugle2 that I built myself with Vishay resistors and Nichicon FG caps.
This is my second Bottlehead kit, unless you count rebuilding my Crack a few times as multiple kits
It's paired with the Schiit Sol turntable. I rushed through the Crack and never bothered to make things look really good, a lesson I learned well for the Eros. I took my time to get things just right. I gave the top plate a glossy black coat, and the trafo cap, silver. A spritz of silver accidentally got onto the top plate, and I decided that actually, that looked
really good. Both got a layer of glossy clear coat after that. The wood base is unfinished, but will be stained with dark brown 'kona' and Danish oil, and also finished with glossy clear coat.
Since this is my end-game, I wanted it to be beyond perfect, so I agonized over a lot of the parts selection.
- For the power supply and shunt regulator wiring, I chose Neotech UP-OCC copper in PVC (20 awg). I made a twisted shielded pair to run from the AC inlet to the trafo and grounded the shield on the earth tab.
- For the signal wiring and ground, I used a combination of Jupiter cryogenic OCC copper in cotton, and Duelund silver in cotton/oil (both solid core). For the ground 'strip' along the bottom terminals, I used Connex OCC 5N silver (sold bare). I also used Cardas quad-eutectic solder, which turned out to be fantastic stuff and so easy to work with.
- I used upgraded tube sockets. For the shunt reg and output tube, I used Belton, and for the input tubes, I used some silver plated sockets. This was a dumb idea, because apparently not all socket manufacturers orient their pin layout the same relative to the mounting hardware... not a major issue, but some of the wiring is a little cockeyed.
- For the RCA sockets, I used KLEI's top of the line low-mass silver RCA sockets. For the outputs, I chose DH Labs CM1 gold-plated copper.
- I used matched boutique resistors for the 47kohm 2W and the 75kohm on the C4S board.
- Awaiting a matched pair of Tung Sol EF806-S.
I put * on the word 'completed' because for near future upgrades, I am thinking:
- Replacing output capacitors with vintage soviet caps, a combination of paper in oil (1 uF) and Teflon (0.22uF). I think 1.22 uF should be sufficient for a 20kohm destination?
- Replacing 100 uF/160V caps in C4S with Dayton or Solen PPE film caps. Maybe I could get away with 90 uF?
- Bypassing 10,000 uF caps on input with
. I have a matched pair of Audyn True Copper Max caps at 0.1uF, but I'm not sure if I'd rather put these in my speaker amp, or if this is the best place for them.
I'm happy to say I only made one mistake early on, and caught it during the first power supply voltage test. I had swapped some resistors, something like red red black brown vs brown red black brown, on brown resistors of course. All other voltage and resistance checks passed the first time! There was a small amount of hum at first, but since removing the ground wire between the Eros and my table, and playing records all weekend, the hum is now barely audible above the background noise at full volume! Not to mention, I have to dig way past listening volume to find said noise floor. This thing is
damn quiet!The sound was harsh, brittle, bass-light, and splashy during the first two hours of playback... to be expected with a set of new tubes. It was actually, in spite of that, still pretty nice sounding and the tubey benefits were clearly audible. After about ten hours, the Eros had fully matured into something that exceeded my expectations. It is amazingly resolving, such that I described to my friend that during quiet passages it could feel like I
was the needle gliding through the grooves... because I could clearly distinguish the low, quiet rumble of the needle passing through silent grooves (listening through a heavily modded Crack > HD800)... but as soon as the music started back up, I was lost in the recording again. Staging, placement, and separation are all superb. To me, this is a very tubey sounding amp. This is not one of those "solid stateish" tube amps... the tube flavor is right up front: spacious, fluid, lush, smooth, but also exceptionally clear, detailed, textured, and dynamic. Just how I like it. On the one hand, it's hard to believe that this
isn't digital... on the other hand, digital only wishes it could have this kind of fullness, body, and sense of realism.
Kudos to the Bottlehead crew for the last phono preamp I'll ever buy or build!
