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When I was in college I thought about building a Dynaco Stereo 400 but by the time I had the money to play, robots had removed all the incentive. Besides, building a race car is more fun.

I've built many "bare-bones" amps in my time. All it took was a couple of bucks for parts and a little extra time. A couple of those amps still stay in my amp graveyard in the garage. I use them for tube backups. Those were the days!

HeathKit amp.

Hafler DH-200 and it still works! Wish I can say that about the ARC preamp that I had repaired three times in six years or the Yamaha DVD player that went down twice in 18 months.

I was going to build myself a portable headphone amp, but I didn't think I had the skills to get it working correctly. . with the quality I wanted. I'm thinking of toying around with building a home amp next year, just to see if I can do it.

Worked old Hheathkit tube amps as two mono blocks. Williamson circuit ultralinear. Built Heathkit 200 watt solid state amp kit in high school. Still using today. Built two mono block tube amps from scratch using ampeg V4 bass amps as foundations for chassis and transformers. Still using them today. kt88 tubes in triode mode. About 60 watts/channel. Built many speaker kits.

I built a preamp from Bottlehead.

A pretty good mains surge filter.

Hard work, good sound.

Made a Heathkit AM radio when I was 7. Recently I've made a pair of full range speakers, and am working on a Marantz 7 clone.

Allied Radio Knight-Kit KX-60 First transistor stereo integrated amp kit; still works. Heathkit AR15 and AP1500. Dynaco Pat4, Pat5, Stereo 120 and 400. Hafler 110, DH200, DH220 and XL280. Numerous Eico and Heathkit test bench gear.

Yes, I built a tubed mono amp some 35 years back. The schematics were picked from a magazine, the tranies wound by a friend and worked well for some 4-5 years. One "magic eye" was also on board.

Preamp, amp, and a headphone amp.

Sure, Dynaco FM-3 tuner and PAT-4 preamp. Both worked great. Also, I designed and built my own speakers. Nowadays, unfortunately, I'm content to buy the overpriced audio jewelry you review in the magazine.

I tried to rebuild the integrated amp (solid state) w/high current power supply but when I finished the damn project, it started like a firecracker. I will try again soon, but I will use my experience in elecronics repair.

In the '70s I built a Hafler set and several speakers, both kits and my own "designs."

Yes, but too many to name them all. Here are a few. A Scott tube integrated amp in 1969 was my first go at audiophile gear. The solid-state amp in 1970 from plans in Popular Electronics. Then, in about 1974, the 400W Ampzilla in kit form.

A 24-band equalizer from a kit when I was 15 years old. I thought my stereo had too much bass so decided the best fine tuning I could do was to build an equalizer!

Speakers, amps, crossovers, acoustic room tuning panels and traps, even a CD player. All but the speakers suck. The speakers were mediocre, but looked good. In other words it was all more fun to build then to listen to.

Currently in use in my living room: A pair of 1980's Sansui speakers I bought on eBay several years ago then rebuilt to my liking. The biggest change was from acoustic suspension to down-ported speakers, using 3" heavy gauge PVC for short port tubes. Kept the 12" Sansui woofers, and refoamed them myself--they only go down to 30Hz but sound surprisingly good. Replaced the extremely tinny sealed mids and tweeters with well matched mid-priced Vifa drivers. Mounted outboard are a pair of prefab 3-way Dayton crossovers obtained from Parts Express, with pigtails of bundled primary wires fed into the cabinets through pieces of 1" high density fiberboard which now cover inside the old terminal cup openings. Kept the speakers' original damping material. I got rid of the clunky plastic parts on the Sansuis' baffles to achive a flat profile for better dispersion, but I still have and use the original grills. Total cost just under $500. How do my MetaSansui speakers sound? No brag, just fact, better than any new mass produced speakers you can get for that price.

I built a Bottlehead Foreplay III. It was easy to build and sounds great. I use it almost every day.

Bottlehead Foreplay preamp and Seduction phono preamp.

Two pairs of speakers, two amplifiers, and one bass guitar amplifier, including speaker.

A solid-state amp.

dyna sca35

A pair of 2-way spkrs from a 'remaindered' kit, 6.5/1" dome tweeter drivers from Taiwan. In DEAD boxes. I added some RC Zrise EQ on mid bass which had no low-pass xover, to improve the blend to the tweeter with an MFPp cap on the tweeter. Though originally for a smaller Rb encl I used an 'oversized' sealed box calculated to give a Qtc a bit above 0.6 w/o stuffing with the multilayer panel's and tar pads volume subtracted - and stuffed them as well! The boxes were made using chamfered biscuit-joints 3/4 inch chipboard veneered outside. Inset front 15mm and rear baffles 17mm for extra stiffness. EACH of the 4 panels on both sides, and top and bottom was stiffened and damped, with three layers of 3mm MDF 'contact-glue clamped' - with concrete blocks - overnight. PLUS tarred felt pads pinned and glued on all 4 sides and the rear baffle. The inset front and rear baffles of chipboard, had 19 mm MDF boards sash-clamp glued to them eliminating the insets. Both these MDF boards were screwed down using 'many' screws, before the glue could dry. The front baffle had a layer of lead sheet between the two boards. I used PVA contact type cement everywhere because it does not outgas solvents into the polymers in drive units. The fibreglass 'tight-fill' was wrapped up in BAF sheets - glued at the edges. The unrebated drivers were then surrounded by a final layer of 3mm MDF flush to their frames with a gap behind at the box edges - to stretch a fabric cover over them. Black cloth and black paint on the 3mm baffle, which was a press-fit. The spkrs had a Bessel function/1st order roll-off in the bass starting at about 80hz reaching second order at about 55 hz. They respond well to wall-mounting - and 2nd order ELF boost, giving good bass extension to 30* hz. * Only at 'sensible' levels mind. A composer of electronic music uses them as monitors in his studio.

Lots! Some from scratch (numerous speakers and one solid-state amp), some from kits (a tube amp and simple preamps). Building stuff is the hobby portion of being an audiophile for me. Music is the focal point, the reason I'm an audiophile, but building and tweaking equipment is just plain fun. I'm very surprised at how few kits and DIY forums there are these days, especially in a world where ICs are so cheap and parts for almost any project can be had on the Internet.

Mullard amp/pre in the 1950s. World Audio Design kits in the '90s, using KT88 & then 300b, plus pre and phono, etc.

An EICO mono tube tuner kit in 1967. It worked!

First speakers were made from those big old oval AM radio speakers retrieved from abandoned cars, installed in shoe boxes. Nothing since has sounded as good.