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Showing posts from May, 2022

Attempting to improve the bass on my DD walkman

I saw a post on the tapeheads forum where mihokm posted his guide for improving the bass response on the DD walkman. He pointed out that many DD models had thin bass and it can be fixed by replacing the tantalum capacitor (potentially aging and faulty) between the NF pin and the bias pin of the BA3304F preamp chip. He said if that capacitor was faulty due to its age, it could lead to a weird peak around 100 Hz, which I has experienced before. Also, he said increasing the capacitor from 10uF to 47uF could improve the bass response. While my DDII does not have the same bass issue he described (20+dB drop at 20Hz), my D3 does, so I replaced the tantalum caps on my D3. I also replaced the electrolytic capacitors (from 220uF to 560uF polymer) before the headphones socket as instructed to lower the cutoff of the high-pass filters and thus further improve the bass response (kind of a shame because the "original" ones were Nichicon gold). 220uF is fine for high-impedance headphones...