Breadboarding a Klon

[caiofilipini]

For some reason, I thought it'd be a good idea to breadboard a Klon.

I'm taking it easy, but the first milestone was hit today, the power supply:



There's some cleaning up to be done, and I'm sure the layout will change as I go along, but I get all 4 reference voltages out of it, so success for now!

 

[fig]

Cool! I was so happy with my first power stage I kept it on its own wafer and use it now and then as a sidecar plugin.

Beware, your soldering iron is watching carefully.

 

[caiofilipini]

Well, I was planning on reporting progress as I worked through it, but I had a work trip last week and a lot of other things going on, so I didn't.

BUT, the good news is I finished it, and even though it looks a lot messier than I wanted it to, it works! The main reason I wanted to do this is because I have a KTR here currently and I wanted to try and get the breadboard to sound as close as possible to it. After I verified the circuit worked as expected, I started auditioning diodes, and here's the current status:



I currently have a pair of ERIE 1N34A diodes in there I got from Pedal Hacker, and they sound surprisingly close! Vf on those as measured with my DDM is 0.358V and 0.363V.

I have some other diodes I want to audition before committing, but so far I'm super happy with this pair. It sounds much better than the first Kliche I built using a random pair of Russian diodes without even measuring them!

 

[fig]

Fantastic! Are you going to solder it up on something?

 

[Big Monk]

Well, I was planning on reporting progress as I worked through it, but I had a work trip last week and a lot of other things going on, so I didn't.

BUT, the good news is I finished it, and even though it looks a lot messier than I wanted it to, it works! The main reason I wanted to do this is because I have a KTR here currently and I wanted to try and get the breadboard to sound as close as possible to it. After I verified the circuit worked as expected, I started auditioning diodes, and here's the current status:

View attachment 17759

I currently have a pair of ERIE 1N34A diodes in there I got from Pedal Hacker, and they sound surprisingly close! Vf on those as measured with my DDM is 0.358V and 0.363V.

I have some other diodes I want to audition before committing, but so far I'm super happy with this pair. It sounds much better than the first Kliche I built using a random pair of Russian diodes without even measuring them!

I ended up using a similar set of 1N34A in my Kliche Mini.

 

[caiofilipini]

Fantastic! Are you going to solder it up on something?

Oh, absolutely! I have a Kliche board and a a Gørva S90 mirror finish enclosure just waiting for this build!

 

[caiofilipini]

Quick recording comparing both (signal chain is Gibson SG Standard > KTR | breadboard > Friedman Mini Dirty Shirley 20W head > Torpedo Captor X > recording interface):

https://soundcloud.com/white-mockingbird%2Fktr-vs-breadboard

1) bypass
2) KTR gain min
3) breadboard gain min
4) KTR gain 12h
5) breadboard gain 12h
6) KTR gain 3h
7) breadboard gain 3h
8) KTR gain dimed
9) breadboard gain dimed

 

[fig]

Nah...fess up now.....you just kept playing on the KTR right?

That's a keeper!

 

[caiofilipini]

Nah...fess up now.....you just kept playing on the KTR right?

That's a keeper!

I'm really happy with this. It's a keeper for sure!

 

[caiofilipini]

Here's the final product:

Mirror Kliche

This is the build that resulted from my stupid idea of breadboarding a Klon, which ended up being not so stupid after all, as I was able to get it to sound close to a KTR I had the opportunity to A/B this against. The breadboard experiment led me to choose a pair of 1N34A diodes made by ERIE I...

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