Building a preamp with the DIYRE CP5

The Gist;

Building your first DIY preamp, what the expect from DIYRE delivery, soldering, circuit boards & CP5 manual, desoldering, solder wick and solder suckers, DIYRE spare parts, repair & support, does the DIYRE CP5 work without module

I first heard about DIYRE in a studio rundown for the amazing Cardinal Song in Oklahoma. For those of you who aren’t across them, DIYRE produce very affordable kits for a variety of preamps, compressors and direct boxes. The unique selling point for me was their Colour modules, sold as a little card that can give their CP5 preamps a different sound, and can be blended as much or little as you may want. What started as an attempt to keep dust out of my empty 500-series spaces with their blank panels quickly turned into an order of two CP5 preamp kits and a handful of blank 50-series panels, “because I’m paying postage anyway.”

Box contents

Fast forward a week or two and a nicely packaged box arrived with my stuff. The blank panels have a nice, uniform, brushed metal look, and the faceplate of the CP5s themselves are the same. The CP5s were well packaged, with bags of components clearly labelled to match the component list PDF that’s available online. Assembly was a breeze, I learned a lot about soldering in a small amount of time because of how many contacts there are, as well as future lessons for making connections and contacts super clean and tidy.

What I learned very quickly was how important it is to really think about the layout of your PCBs because about halfway, and not before trying to attach the faceplate I… *record scratch* soldered four switches on backwards.

Potential problems

So, as pictured, I’d found the spot for the three switches that toggle 48V, phase and the pad, as well as the Colour module on/off switch and soldered them on backwards. The piece of the button that is depressed (you and me both buddy, as I slowly realise what a catastrophic mistake this was turning out to be) to turn the circuit on/off was now attached to face inwards towards the back of the unit, instead of poking out through the faceplate as intended. All this is despite the instruction on the PCB itself that screamed ‘Opposite Side’.

Six contacts per switch means 24 contacts on the PCB that would need to be painstakingly removed one by one, or somehow heated all at once in order to pry off the switches. The latter would probably cause irreversible damage to the circuit board as a whole, and the former is much more difficult than it seems, no matter how many stabs I took at it.

I shot off an email to DIYRE support on a Saturday (AEST) but didn’t expect much quickly from them on a weekend, nor in my Australian timezone. DIYRE Support replied within hours, explaining their catch-all fee for replacement parts and a new PCB was on its way.

In the meantime, I tried to gently pry off one of the switches while heating some of the solder to no avail. A solder sucker was one of the first tools I bought to accompany my soldering iron itself, and while that works a treat for cleaning up excess solder, it’s not always ideal for removing contact entirely. Some quick Googling led me to solder wick (also known as desolder wick or de/solder braid), a simple enough to use product that sucks up solder from a contact when heated and pressed against a connection. Again, while solder wick is great for removing excess solder from one contact point at a time, I couldn’t remove enough to allow me to remove all six contact points that each of the switches had to remove them. A combination of both tools worked best, removing excess with the wick and sucking as much as I could out. Repeatedly getting frustrated and seeing no improvement, I consistently spent a little time here and there over the rest of the weekend trying to fix my mistake. In the meantime, I’d used spare parts from the second CP5 kit and completed one CP5 which looks, sounded and felt great. I want to clarify here: the CP5s still work without a colour module. I couldn’t find much info about this before buying. My next move will be a handful of colour modules to try before sinking my teeth into some more CP5 builds or an OLA5, DIYRE’s optical compressor module.

Still not really sure how I missed these instructions

Lessons Learnt

This was a great experience and for the soldering alone I feel I’ve learned a lot. Doing a quick dry-assembly can pay dividends, and will save you buying replacement parts, despite how helpful, understanding and fast DIYRE were with my switches and circuit board. In fairness, the mistakes have now prepared me for cleaning and fixing soldering joints in the future, with my solder wick and sucker at the ready.

The Sound

The preamps sound great, even without Colour Modules, they’re clean with plenty of gain. Honestly I’m not sure where to turn with buying Colour module cards, but I’m sure they’ll all sound unique, even if they’re not specifically exactly the same as whatever they’re trying to emulate. Let’s be real, a matched pair of preamps will never go astray, especially with customer support as good as DIYRE’s!

Installing Patchbays: Part One

The Gist;

Patchbay connection types, learning audio cable types, patchbay wiring tools

In June 2020, I jumped into a wormhole that I didn’t really know the depth of. Recording consoles are romanticised, both aesthetically and sonically, and a Soundcraft 200B popped up online at a price that was too good to pass up. The courier who delivered (or more so failed to) the console is a story for another time, but the last two years have been spent slowly figuring out the ins and outs of console workflow, both literally and figuratively, and the the more I understood, the more I wanted to access all those ins and outs (the literal ones). The time has come to dive into another wormhole - patchbays.

Professional patch bays require some careful consideration, planning and soldering, so I’ll document my build in the hope that any lessons or mistakes I learn or make along the way can help make for a smoother process for anyone reading this. To start, I needed to decide what type of connections I wanted, and how many I needed.

TT, Bantam patchbays and DB25, ELCO or EDAC connectors

TT, or Tiny-Tel a.k.a. bantam patch bays are the most space savvy solution, offering 96 sockets in 1-2 rack units spaces, and the sockets offering superior life because of rigid construction and components. For something used to constantly plug and unplug connectors, the sturdy construction for extra cash makes sense. I’d begun scouring Reverb, got sidetracked a handful of times by things still sitting on my Watch List, but was admittedly overwhelmed by the backside of the patchbays where most of my work would take place. While the front of the TT patchbays looked familiar, what with dual rows of 48 tiny sockets, the backs of some of them featured plugs and connectors I’d never seen before. DB25 connectors are reasonably common, and some patchbays featured connectors for soldering directly which seemed too finicky and permanent for my scattered brain. Some patchbays featured hulking, massive ELCO plugs filled with tiny, crimped pins, while one listing from a store called ChurchGear showed patchbays with 96 three-pin EDAC plugs that seemed simple enough to get my head around. DB25 required me to do banks of 8 connections at a time, while ELCO was good for 12. I’d previously been gifted a patchbay by Jason Fuller at Goatsound while interning with him, and that one featured Centronics ribbon connectors that I’d managed to make a mess of.

EDAC seemed simple enough to get my head around, while offering me the flexibility to do one plug at a time, or as many as a I needed for different racks or spots for inserts. I contacted ChurchGear about buying two at once, got them shipped from Nashville, Tennessee and refreshed the tracking more times than I care to admit.

Ordering more parts, tools, pieces and plugs

The patchbays arrived, and I quickly realised

that despite having zoomed into the product listing photos examining the EDAC connectors, I only had one half of the plugs to connect actual cables (which I didn’t have enough of either). EDAC connectors, similar to ELCO, make connections via pins making contact, and I needed plugs to connect my looms that would then slot into the plugs hardwired into the patchbay itself. ChurchGear had left a couple of the required plugs on the patchbay, so with a little Googling I found listings for the connectors on Redco’s site, a company who make some of the most popular patchbays on the planet. The connectors were split into plastic housing for the pins and the pins themselves, split into either crimp-style connectors or solder-joints. The latter needs some soldering

skills I’ve slowly been working on, and the former required more tools that, while being available from Redco, was more money than I needed to spend. I bought a few hundred of the plastic plugs, a few hundred pins and an EDAC insertion tool (that I realised I had no use for when the package finally arrived a few weeks later) and I could actually make a start on wiring the patchbays.