Cmoy amp good meh? It's made up of less than USD10's worth of parts and can be built in 15 minutes Maybe add 2 more bucks for a tin of strepsils.

I have the ER-4Ps that I use with my iPod mini. Note that they come 3 sets (if I'm not mistaken) of silicon eartips and foamies... if you're having trouble with the silicons then just use the foamies. I personally use foamies for a better seal - they give you better bass too.

All the ER-4 models have identical drivers, it's just the cable which is different. I had my original cable (the "rubbery" one) broken, sent it back to Ety and within 2 weeks I got them back with the new braided cable.

I'm in aus leh

A Cmoy with generic parts can be made with less than USD15 easily, especially if you "mass-produce" and buy them in bulk lah. I have a cmoy and meta in KL, but I did put a fake alps in as well as silver plated ofc, and IIRC it was less than AUD40 in materials... but my 2132s were samples

Why would you want vishays in a cmoy? By generic parts I meant radioshack stuff, which is what most people who make and sell these for profit would use anyway. Only PIMETAs get spec'd with vishays and branded caps, but if you don't take shipping and profit into cost the real worth of a cmoy is only 15 bucks. And compared to a mint/meta/pimeta/ppa it does sound 15 bucks.

I really recommend anyone who wants an amp to get a PIMETA or PPA instead - it may cost more but the improvement in sound quality is enough to justify it. Not to mention that if you ever want to tweak it with minor upgrades (rolling OPAs, stacking and such) you could, since doing so with a cmoy would get you little improvement.

Having vishays isn't going to make your cmoy sound any better.

Advantages of higher grade resistors are:

i) They are matched closely, meaning Vishay gurantees that they will not go off by more than +/-1%, meaning if a particular resistor is rated for 10 Ohms it will not be more than 10.1 or less than 9.9 Ohms. A pariah resistor might go off as much as 5%.

Most people aren't going to pair a cmoy with top tier phones, ie. Stax, K1000s (not like a cmoy can power these anyway), CD/SA3k and of course your HD650s. No one is going to notice that a 5% difference in left/right channel resistance with their PX100s. For a piece of mind, you could always match resistor pairs, if you had a whole bag of resistors that shouldn't be a problem.

The same reason applies as to why you wouldn't need to use Blue Velvet pots. If you insist on "quality" components, why not make a matched step attenuator for your cmoys?

ii) They heat up less, and heat is known to alter resistance values for the resistor, making them truer to their rated values vs pariah resistors.

A cmoy is designed to be portable, hence most of them run on batteries. There is not enough current to significantly cause the resistors to heat up.


So back to your original question, IMO, yes I do think a cmoy is too crappy for quality components.

This post has been edited by skyther: Aug 23 2005, 09:14 PM

*shrugs*

A cmoy was made to be cheap, so putting quality components into a cmoy while pushing the cost up defeats the purpose of the design to be simple and cheap.

Whatever floats your boat I guess. A Wira with Evolution mods (ala 4G63) is still a Wira, if you get what I mean. There's only so much you can do to improve something that was meant to be for the budget minded.

Zzzz. There's no difference lah. Cmoy is to weak to power higher end headphones. The circuit is so simple, the parts for it are available everywhere unlike PIMETA/PPA etc where most people will have to order the PCB. Cmoy is really to help people without a background in electronics build their first amplifier. In other words, it makes really little sense for someone to actually buy one.

And the parts I used for mine were not exactly super cheap, afaik the chinese Alps is actally comparable with the real thing, minus the stupid stepped action they tried to imitate.

Resistors make very little, if any difference in sound. The capacitors, OPA and workmanship are the ones that make a difference in sound. The only part of the resistor that would matter is the wire and material used, but that's not even 1CM long so it becomes rather insignificant.

Taken from Tangent's website: http://tangentsoft.net/audio/cmoy-tutorial/parts.html


lol, that's really like using a 500W PSU for a PC that has only a non Prescott CPU, 1 HDD and 1 DVD-ROM.

If you happen to drop by Head-Fi (I don't go there much anymore, the place was much better before all the nice guys left), check around to see who pairs a cmoy with their 400-dollar-or-more headphone in their primary rig.

^ go see Snufkin, he's on Head-Fi... he has a shop selling headphones/amps and other related equipment somewhere in Leederville.

I can get the address for you if you want. He'll let you demo the stuff, that really helps you decide for yourself what may suit you or sound best.

This post has been edited by skyther: Sep 11 2005, 10:41 PM