Home Tweakers' Asylum

Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

Potted Late Last Night

Yes, I made four units, and they are located on each end of the speaker cables. I have them installed so that the spade of the speaker cable is between the spade of the filter and the amp/speaker, in other words the filter spade is furthest from the amp or speaker body. I did some extended listening last night and the clarity is really noticeable - on acoustic guitar I can hear the resonances of the guitar body and the decay of the strings more clearly.

The grounding experiments were interesting. Maybe my earth ground has a lot of RF noise on it from everything else in my house, but it did not sound better than simply grounding the shield to the (-) leg, in fact I thought it sounded a little worse (but not by much, it was close). To do that I simply alligator clipped the ground wire to the shield on one end and used an old cut off plug I had laying around to connect to the earth ground via the ground plug.

One thing I like about these units is their small size - they can fit right on the posts supported only by the silver leads; they look about the same size as the Walker units.

I potted them last night using MG Chemicals clear epoxy #832C. I'm not expecting any dielectric issues since there is very little wire exposed in the first place (only the solder joints, basically), and since the epoxy has a dielectric constant of ~3, which is better than polyester and PVC which many folks use as insulation on their wires. Since it is not a filled epoxy I don't need to worry about the dielectric properties of the filler. The epoxy flowed very nicely into the nooks and crannies of the box - I filled it to just below the top of the box, then bent the shield over and snapped on the lid. It's curing now and I should have pictures for you tonight. Besides the obvious benefit of rigidity and protection from shorting, the epoxy also has a higher thermal conductivity than still air, so it should help the resistor to dissipate heat (and thus RF) better. The hard epoxy combined with the Mortite damping layer may give some vibration control benefits as well.

I'll let you know how it works out.





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