Inspiration

Inspiration strikes like lightning.

More often than not, you never know when it’ll come. And when it does, it comes with a great flash and rumble, threatening to overdrive you into a frenzy.

And yet, without it, the serene in-between pauses almost seem like a drug-withdrawal stupor.

And it beckons.

It beckons.

How could anyone resist?

O2 Headphone Amp

Everything laid out!

Everything laid out!

The board

The board

Halfway there

Halfway there

Testing... Houston, we have a go!

Testing... Houston, we have a go!

Audio salvation?

Audio salvation?

Building the headphone amp was a merry-go-round business with ordering lots of components from different suppliers, even running to Jalan Pasar and buying op-amps and getting cheated on the price.
This design is supposed to rival expensive headphone amps, and sounds almost the same as a Benchmark DAC in blind listening tests. For more information visit http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/

Estimated Costs
 RM100 (Farnell Stuff)
 RM30 (PCB Board)
 RM10 (NJM2068D - kena conned, should be RM4 or less)
 RM 7 (2 x NJM4556AD)
 RM40 (about there, for a 18VAC AC-AC transformer)
 RM60 (enclosure)
 RM30 (machined front plate) 

 RM270 (Total)

If any of you are interested in this amplifier, I can build one for you ;)

It’s been a while

Portraits photographed at Jelatek station, the row of abandoned houses.




Su Ting and Stella as models, with photographers Jeremy and Ezrul.

Shots were from my A55/Tamron 1750/2.8. Still learning how to use it nicely.

More projects coming up, hopefully more stuff to show soon :)

Stay tuned.

Noise and detail perception

Noise increases the perception of detail in a particular photo.

Both are converted from a digital color image to a black and white image. One has noise added to it to simulate film grain, one is clean, as is converted from the original image.

Noise helps trick the eye into thinking there is detail in areas which seem very “clean”, such as skin, walls, and fabric. We typically perceive very fine patterns in these objects which might not be apparent in photos taken digitally, and so adding noise can serve to “fake” the texture of these objects.

Cleanly converted

Added noise