Silver Blues
Well-known member
- Build Rating
Last Monday's holiday here in Canada gave me an excuse to finally put together my Nobelium, after a looooooooong time of the parts just sitting next to me on the desk. This is my third @vigilante398 project, and they never cease to be enjoyable builds that give kick-ass results. Here she is:
It's perhaps not super clear from these pictures, but I went with a Tayda Silver Hammer enclosure and the C2C-provided faceplate. The knobs are black "cupcakes" from AES, a suggestion from my partner; at first I wasn't completely convinced the aesthetics would match, but it turns out they look pretty great and I like them a lot. I further shook it up by opting for black hex-head screws instead of the typical stainless Philips screws. The tube backlights are blue. Jacks are NYS229 with these dress nuts and a Lumberg thinline DC jack, and the switches are my current favourite Taiways from LMS with a thread-through dress nut from AES. Since I figured this would be a permanent part of my signal chain, I splurged on the parts. I'm using the Lightning Boy MC15 for a transformer; all caps are Wima or Nichicon (or whatever silver micas they sell at AES, lol); the resistors are Philips MPR24 0.1% metal films except for the 10Ms which I could only get in MRS25 1%; and I managed to snag a pair of NOS RCA 6189s to be the heart of this monster build. It is my single most expensive build to date, I think.
Unfortunately, the build itself took me all day, so it gets four stars (through no fault of C2C's!). There was a lot more filing and drilling than I had bargained for, because Tayda fucked up my holes (phrasing) by drilling the two standoff mounts ever so slightly too close together and too much to the left, so the left edge of the board rubbed the enclosure and prevented the board from actually fitting inside. I had to file down both the tube daughterboard and the enclosure itself, which ameliorated but did not eliminate the issue, so I caved and drilled the mounting holes on the board itself a bit bigger, which did work well. Then, the pots didn't really have enough exposed thread, so I had to file down the little alignment tabs on the faces of each of them. Once all of that nonsense was dealt with, everything else went fine. The transformer daughterboard is held surprisingly stably by the XLR jack and the whole thing feels very solid.
So how does it sound? I think I can see why the product that inspired this project commands such a high price, given how incredible this sounds. It just gives this weight and power and smoothness to one's tone that I'm not sure I can describe further without devolving into completely unobjective buzzwords. For me the XLR output is fine at 50% on the trimmer, so I didn't adjust it. I was messing around a little bit with running the XLR out into one channel of my recording interface and the 1/4" out to the other channel and hard-panning each one to a different side, which is fun. I found that using the low-cut and turning up the bass knob a bit works extremely well to clarify a low B without losing its heft. The EQ curves are intelligently designed and it's actually worth turning up the treble control to explore for useful sounds. 10/10 going directly on my pedalboard as the last element (no pun intended).
It's perhaps not super clear from these pictures, but I went with a Tayda Silver Hammer enclosure and the C2C-provided faceplate. The knobs are black "cupcakes" from AES, a suggestion from my partner; at first I wasn't completely convinced the aesthetics would match, but it turns out they look pretty great and I like them a lot. I further shook it up by opting for black hex-head screws instead of the typical stainless Philips screws. The tube backlights are blue. Jacks are NYS229 with these dress nuts and a Lumberg thinline DC jack, and the switches are my current favourite Taiways from LMS with a thread-through dress nut from AES. Since I figured this would be a permanent part of my signal chain, I splurged on the parts. I'm using the Lightning Boy MC15 for a transformer; all caps are Wima or Nichicon (or whatever silver micas they sell at AES, lol); the resistors are Philips MPR24 0.1% metal films except for the 10Ms which I could only get in MRS25 1%; and I managed to snag a pair of NOS RCA 6189s to be the heart of this monster build. It is my single most expensive build to date, I think.
Unfortunately, the build itself took me all day, so it gets four stars (through no fault of C2C's!). There was a lot more filing and drilling than I had bargained for, because Tayda fucked up my holes (phrasing) by drilling the two standoff mounts ever so slightly too close together and too much to the left, so the left edge of the board rubbed the enclosure and prevented the board from actually fitting inside. I had to file down both the tube daughterboard and the enclosure itself, which ameliorated but did not eliminate the issue, so I caved and drilled the mounting holes on the board itself a bit bigger, which did work well. Then, the pots didn't really have enough exposed thread, so I had to file down the little alignment tabs on the faces of each of them. Once all of that nonsense was dealt with, everything else went fine. The transformer daughterboard is held surprisingly stably by the XLR jack and the whole thing feels very solid.
So how does it sound? I think I can see why the product that inspired this project commands such a high price, given how incredible this sounds. It just gives this weight and power and smoothness to one's tone that I'm not sure I can describe further without devolving into completely unobjective buzzwords. For me the XLR output is fine at 50% on the trimmer, so I didn't adjust it. I was messing around a little bit with running the XLR out into one channel of my recording interface and the 1/4" out to the other channel and hard-panning each one to a different side, which is fun. I found that using the low-cut and turning up the bass knob a bit works extremely well to clarify a low B without losing its heft. The EQ curves are intelligently designed and it's actually worth turning up the treble control to explore for useful sounds. 10/10 going directly on my pedalboard as the last element (no pun intended).
