Solo: Part 2 - the marques?

Solo: Part 2 – the marques?

Mark 1 to Mark 4: 2001-2003

Solo Mark 1

If you just read part 1 you'll have seen the reason why only two Mark 1's were ever made. Somehow the headphone lover wasn't into a plastic case for his (her) 165 GBP high performance headphone amplifier? Unlike the Gram Amp plastic boxed phono preamps that were by then selling 10 a week!

Inside it was the dual AD826 ultra fast op-amp slewing at 350 volts per micro-second, its attendant fast small signal bipolar transistor push-pull output buffer stage (x2 being stereo), my own take on a cap multiplier, the hand matched Alps pot, and the legendary Elna ROD "Starget" capacitors. At its side was the (now 163 GBP) fledgling PSU1 power supply!

Only two? Yes, mine and the one sent to Dejan V Veselinovic, the TNT reviewer. That just goes to show that even with a great review, we buy with our eyes!

The other flop was the Era Gold! Yes, the now "famous" Era Gold "bombed" big time because it wasn't exactly eye candy - the plastic case made it sound awful! And a TNT Audio reviewer made sure his audience knew it! But did the case actually make it sound awful? No, the eye-mind interface made it sound awful - the truth is it sounded no different to the latter metal cased Era Gold. The same went for the Solo.

Solo Mark 2

So the search for a metal case the customer could afford ensued. There were and still are some natty looking anodized aluminium "stock" cases around, easily obtainable too - at a price! They were OK for the hobbyist but add the margins a business must make for itself and its pioneering dealers, and the word exorbitant springs to mind.

The answer turned out to be the "sign-box" case: made from the extrusion used to make illuminated signs you see outside take-aways and booze stores. How else does a one man band (at that time) attempt to compete with the likes of Musical Fidelity and Pro-Ject to name but two?

The extrusion was nothing short of user-unfriendly being the wrong height but it was all I could find within my meager budget. It was "padded out" using some red plastic giving rise to the "go-faster" stripes down each side. The font and rear panels were laser cut then polyester powder coated (as were the extrusions), to which was applied the then norm of cut vinyl lettering from the graphics department of the local bike shop!

Solo Mark 3

That was the Mark 2 Solo. It looked reasonable for its price and sales started to happen. However, the quality of paint finish left a lot to be desired and although I tried Perspex for a while from the local engraver's shop, silver had by that time become the "new black". The extrusions were already supplied "silver" anodized, so all I needed was silver anodized fronts and rears. I found a source of silver anodized 3mm sheet and persuaded my PCB manufacturer to rout out the panels and print them. All was fine and the Mark 3 was "born". Scott Faller of TNT Audio reviewed it:-

"As you would expect from a quality piece of gear, the Solo performs extremely well. The bass is deep, controlled and well defined. The treble is crisp and extended without being harsh or splashy. The midrange is detailed and fluid. The combination of the Solo and the PSU1 or as Graham calls it, the Monitor Class, provides your head with a very open and spacious musical presentation. All in all, the Solo Mark III is very smooth and coherent top to bottom.
 
As my music memory has it, comparing the Solo to the Headroom, I'd say the Solo Mark III is probably the more musical of the two amps. That in itself is pretty surprising to me. Here we have a competing design that is less than ½ of the price of what many consider the do all - end all of headphone amps. Granted the Solo doesn't have all the bells and whistles (all of the EQ settings and channel summing options) the Headroom Max has, but on a straight up sonic comparison of the two, I'd bet you'd find the Solo easier to live with."

Solo Mark 4

If anyone deserved a break in life I felt I did. By now I'd used up several "tons" of ingenuity just on the box! But right round the corner a twin tragedy was awaiting: 1] my PCB manufacturer went bust! It didn't go bust in any ordinary way – it went bust in a very secretive way: it simply went away with no means of being able to communicate with it or extract my artworks or tooling it kept to make the PCBs or panels; 2] The sign-box extrusion manufacturer got really sloppy and my supplier sent me a pile of wildly distorted and scratched cut lengths I couldn’t use - and billed me for them! This was late summer 2003 and my first real public exposure: the Heathrow Show sharing a room with Mark Baker's Origin Live, was on the line. I was to have no cases and no PCBs.

The Mark 4 Solo was "born" out of complete despair. I discovered and did a deal with Lincoln-Binns for their "on-show quality" extrusions which Origin Live also used at the time, and found a metal worker to make the front and rear panels. The Mark 4 was the most difficult thing I'd ever made because the board was designed for bolting down and testing in situ, but the extrusion was a one-piece section having no access to the board meaning they all had to be jig-tested and then housed with great difficulty. Most of the panels were misshapen, the powder coating was blotchy and the screen-printing….? I think I lost more money than I made on the Mark 4 because of the number of reject panels that hit the scrap bin! Customers loved it - I hated it!

By my particular winter of discontent (2003) I'd had enough of this struggle and decided a complete rethink was necessary. Surprisingly though, people liked the Mark 3 and 4 enough to go out and buy it providing the required pennies to start doing the job the right way at last (see next topic: Solo Pt.3: the years).

So was it all about appearances? The short answer is yes! The price had risen because of the metalwork. The only mod to the actual circuit had been increasing the size of the output caps. It was essentially the same Solo it always had been, but the eyes now told the ears it sounded good!