A 30W iron that is not temperature controlled, or a 50 W temperature controlled iron. Earthed, then you shouldnt damage the PCB. If its an audio amplifier, its far less likely to be damaged by static electricity, otherwise when you roll up on stage in your nylon trousers and crepe rubber soled sneakers and touch the mic.. zap ! gone ! Theres also the likes of the TP100 temperature controlled iron that can run off 12 volts and will do PCBs. Leaded solder for the win, not unleaded solder because if you used unleaded in the early days the product was quite likely to have to go to landfill because the joints all cracked under the chips (loads of Sony PS3s had that one ... ) If it had used leaded solder you could have used it.. The way to check is to try and melt both of them - the unleaded stuff doesnt melt so easily. Its rubbish.
So, I had a bash before you wrote this and took no precautions whatsoever. The soldering iron worked well, but although I melted the existing solder on each leg and then added a bit it's no better. Maybe I was a bit quick/careful and it didn't melt onto the PCB track, or maybe the switch itself is the problem. I might have another go later and be a bit more aggressive about it, the solder on the leg melted very quickly so I can't think I'd damage the PCB very easily. When all's said and done, it was £20 and all it does is provide a better matched impedance for my headphones to remove a couple of impedance mismatch frequency spikes that I wouldn't even have noticed if I wasn't mixing in the headphones. Did you know your headphone impedance needs to be at least 5x your headphone amp/socket impedance? Not a lot of people know that.
Several things with switches - they are bigger pieces of metal than most components, so need more heat. Then because they are mechanical they are often likely to just fail through oxidation or wear. You may also have levered the pads off the PCB by sliding or moving the switch lever. In which case the bit you solder to actually ends up disconnected , with circular cracks round the pins. You may have to solder bits of copper strands to the pins and a bit further along the track to fix it. If the PCB is the old SRBP (resin bonded paper ) brown stuff, beloved of small volume British manufacturers, you are right to take care with the heat as the most heat sensitive part is often the PCB track itself. With the green/blue/red/black fibreglass FR4 board As used in most electronics these days except ultimate junk, this can withstand a lot of heat, and its more mechanical damage from pushing the pad off the PCB or ripping it off when you havent melted the solder and you pull on a component.
It's cheap junk with a valve that's just for show where a capacitor would have done the job. It's a push switch to select input.
It's called a Little Bear 1. There's a funny video on Youtube of one of their other models where the chap pulls the valve out and nothing happens. lol This one stops if you pull it out and it does take a few seconds to warm up before the sound builds up so it's doing something but I don't think it's what we associate with valve amps.
I suspect your valve isn't actually doing anything at all . Been reading reviews of the other models. They're hilarious.
They are funny! I borrowed it from a friend to see if it would suit my purpose. I was well aware the valve is pure sparkle, you have to pay good money for a real valve amp and valves these days are such poor quality I wouldn't want the hassle. Actually the amp sounds pretty good. It's not a difficult thing to make a reasonable headphone amp.
True. Plenty of decent valves around still, although usually they are actually connected to the circuit .
I doubt it. I’d doubt it’s doing anything. Where’s the HT coming from? I suspect a boggo op-amp is doing the amplifying. I might buy one and take it to pieces…
It is "a valve", it does glow orange where it should (and also has a blue LED to make it even prettier). What it isn't is a valve being used in any way that effects the sound in the way a "valve amp" does. The amp will be a chip I'm sure. It's not a "valve amp". Can't see any printing on it so if it goes pop I'll be in trouble... but... it cost me less than a packet of baccy, 1/3 of a tank of petrol...
We shall have to disagree on that one, speaking from experience a regulated supply makes one hell of a difference, even better if it's a shunt reg Although, if it's single ended you might argue if you should listen to the valve or the shunt. There's some cracking IXCY devices that I built both shunt and series regs from in a past existence, but then I got single and "got a life" again playing with old VW's....maybe I really should get out more
Messa boogie were throwing away so many valves after testing that they actually now make their own! Something like 19/20 or even worse were out of spec from new and when you rely on balanced pairs to avoid a sh!t load hum it does matter. I read about these things.
