New DIY amplifier completed

[restorer-john]

mondialfan, I've gone full circle with LED colours. Back when all we had was red, all I wanted was green/orange/yellow/blue and white. Blue came 20 years ago and wow, I loved it, but too many Xmas trees and too many TVs standby lights later I have fallen out of love with it.

That said, dimmed subtley it looks nice.

Incidentally, a Nobel Prize was awarded for the invention of the blue LED.

"Akasaki and Amano worked together on the technology at Nagoya University, while Nakamura at the time was working at Nichia Chemical Corporation. It took more than a decade of work to produce practical blue-LED designs in the 1990s.

The trio will split an award of about $1.1 million. That's a lot more than the $200 that Nichia paid Nakamura for his invention -- but less than the $8 million he won in 2005 in a lawsuit arguing that he deserved a bigger share of the royalties his invention brought in."

I say keep it blue but dim it so it doesn't put a searchlight across the room at night like much of the high end gear I see in shops.

 

[mondialfan]

restorer-john, Sounds like your experience with LED's predates mine by a good 10 years or so. When I was taking electronics classes in the mid-80's it seems we had everything but Blue and White. My 1st experience with Red LED's was the TI watch and calculators my father bought me back in the mid-70's. He worked for TI from '73 - '95 so I always had some of the latest high-tech items.

The blue LED in the amp is a powerful sucker, even with only like 5ma its still blasting out the light. I'm not sure the specs of it as I bought it from apexjr. It definitely needs to be tamed some more.

 

[Hawkgt]

Looks Great Kevin.As previously posted alot of time was spent designing and building.Bet it even sounds better then great.

Regards Bill

 

[mondialfan]

Looks Great Kevin.As previously posted alot of time was spent designing and building.Bet it even sounds better then great.

Regards Bill

Thanks Bill, It does sound good. I'm still trying to get a decent amount of "seat time" in listening to it. I spent about an hour tonight listening and I haven't found anything to fault it on yet.

 

[mondialfan]

I took a couple of pictures of the back plate of the amp to show why I used the booster heat sink inside of the amp.

 

[smurfer77]

"Akasaki and Amano worked together on the technology at Nagoya University, while Nakamura at the time was working at Nichia Chemical Corporation. It took more than a decade of work to produce practical blue-LED designs in the 1990s.

The trio will split an award of about $1.1 million. That's a lot more than the $200 that Nichia paid Nakamura for his invention -- but less than the $8 million he won in 2005 in a lawsuit arguing that he deserved a bigger share of the royalties his invention brought in."

Actually, in Japan industrial researchers are due 10% of any profits that the employer gains from the discovery, irrespective of patent ownership and internal corporate rules. Nichia went from a small town gig to one of the biggest semiconductor players in the world thanks to the blue led which allowed them to have a monopoly on full colour LED displays (red and green already being available, and need just blue for full colour) as well as blue lasers for 10 years covered by the patent. There profits were in the several - 10 billion $ range at the time of the law suit. Nakamura was initially award ~10% of those profits, and this went downgraded eventually to the $8million. He actually just this to counter sue them after they original came after him for allegedly leaking trade secrets when he left Japan (he continued research on GaN when he went to the USA, and friction between him and Nichia were inevitable). Anyway, they didn't treat him that well, and the $8million mostly went to legal expenses... he managed to pay off his house... that's it. The best part of the story (that may not be publicly known) is that Nichia threatened to fire him if it didn't move from GaN to other directions, as they felt GaN was a dead end.