Survey: component upgrades

[northwind]

If you could spend $1000 replacing components in a BeePre2 kit with both upgrade options and you already had your favorite tubes, what would you buy?

[Paul Birkeland]

I'd spend it on room treatments

[johnsonad]

I second PB.  There is much more bang for your buck in room treatments.

[northwind]

I have a dedicated room with a lot more invested in it than the preamp costs.  No worries on that front, friends.  I have not selected a Bottlehead product for cost reasons; I've selected it in preference to more expensive commercial offerings because I want both the organic richness that a 300B can bring, and the low impedance of the output buffer to drive long cables and amplifiers in parallel.  Plus, I can wire an excellent remote controlled attenuator in the middle of the circuit and lose nothing for functionality.  This will also be the third Bottlehead product I've owned and the fourth electronics kit I've built, so I have a pretty good idea what to expect.

The kit ships with a selection of components that are value conscious, and more can be wrung out of its excellent circuit design with a larger budget.  In the context of the system it's going into, the extra dollars would not be poorly spent.

My own thoughts on the matter are:

1. I like the silver wire DH Labs made for Parts Connexion.  That's definitely going in.
2. The coupling capacitors have to go.  I like the older V-Cap TFTF and the newer Miflex KPCU, so I'm thinking the V-Cap ODAM would be a good choice here.  They wouldn't require any additional mechanical reinforcement or relocation, and I'll only be buying 4, since I'm all SE.
3. The electrolytics in the B+ and cathode bypass seem like good candidates for replacement and the addition of low-value bypass caps.  I've heard the Audio Note Kaisei are good, and expanding the chassis to use film caps is an option.  There are infinite choices for bypass caps, and I lean toward trying the .1uF Duelund copper foils that are based on the Jensen tooling.
4. I do not have a good intuition for which resistors, if any, could use love.  The fact that many different kinds are used in the amp, and that resistors are not generally expensive, makes me inclined to think they're probably already in a good place.
5. I don't have intuition for whether there are opportunities for meaningful improvement in the filament supply.
6. Depending on which RCA connectors ship with the kit, there might be an opportunity there.

[Paul Birkeland]

The ODAM caps are a good choice since they aren't so enormous that they won't fit in the chassis.  The B+ power supply caps are not in the signal path once you add the second upgrade, so upgrading them would be more a matter of what you want to look at when you flip the preamp over rather than what will sound better.  Do keep in mind that the ripple current rating of some of those caps is rather important, and an audiophile cap with no ripple current rating shouldn't be used unless you're willing to tolerate the risk that the lifetime of those parts is very short. 

The cathode bypass caps provided are a good quality Nichicon cap made for audio components, but there are a zillion other choices that are similar an not particularly expensive. Typically for a part like this, we will use something like a Nichicon Fine Gold that's stocked in 10,000+ quantities at multiple vendors so we don't get hung up with part backorders.

[debk]

I have the ODAM caps in mine, and like they way they sound.  I have used them in a number of projects.
I can't say more about how room treatment can change sound.  I have listened to the same equipment in two different rooms of my house, and they sound like two completely different system. 

[RPMac]

I'd spend it on room treatments

I live in my wife’s house….$1000 wouldn’t touch the “room treatments” she wants.
I would spend it on good tequila and enjoy music with her.
Oh wait, I’m doing that now.

I preordered the BeePre 1….no upgrades available.
I added a ladder-step volume….best improvement I have ever done. So, the B-quiet would be a must.
I changed output caps to Russian PIO 10uf, then WE PIOs. All sound good.
The reason I stick with the “1” is because I can use 6A3s which I have a good collection of….RCA dual single plates favorites. I have some EML 300Bs, but haven’t made the changes to try them…yet.

Don’t know if there’s any other components that need addressing.