Bottlehead Beepre 2 build

Thought I would share some photos and thoughts on a recently completed Beepre 2 build. Overall this was a fairly simple build and a pleasure to work on. Much easier than building a Mainline amp.

First up, gluing and assembling the wood base. Also set the top plate on to make sure fitment is gooood.



Hardware installed (jeez that transformer is heavy at around 15lbs I'd guess?) and tubes seated temporarily to get an idea of how it will look.


Around 4 or 5 hours of soldering later, the power section of the preamp is complete. Green twisted pair wires head over to provide power to the 300bs.






Another couple of hours of snipping, stripping, zipping and soldering wires and the input wiring to the input selection switch is complete. The kit makes use of cat5 for this section.





Next up are various resistors and wiring of the 300b tube sockets.





Finally, a few 10uf caps are installed, along with a few twisted pairs of wires from the volume potentiometer to the output jacks at the back of the chassis. I plan on later upgrading the caps. My mainline uses vcap ODAM, but I might try something different here.

 

Finally, with all voltage tests passed, I slapped some Kona stain on the base, flipped her right side up, and slapped in some 300Bs.







I plan on installing a second pair of RCA output jacks, and have some coming in the mail. The volume potentiometer upgrade kit is also on order, to match the Mainline's nice setup.


I plan on posting listening impressions and future mods when time allows.

 

Awesome build.
Out of curiosity, how would you describe the sound quality? I've always been impressed with the sonics these BH kits put out.

 

Will do! A lot of upgrades have happened in a short period of time so I'm still getting reacquainted with things. (New caps, new dac (Yiggy LIM), etc.)

 

Upgrades

I deal with some pretty serious chronic pain (some days worse than others) and winter is a bastard for me. Hence the long delay on updates! (Sob story over).

A lot of goodies have come in over the months for this pre, and I'll try and summarize the updates for y'all.

First up was the Bee2Quiet stepped attenuator. I noticed a bottleneck in resolution and plankton retrieval when feeding my Mainline right off the bat. This upgrade brought it a lot closer to the levels I was used to hearing. It's also great to have channel balance near perfect, along with a satisfying thunk when adjusting the coarse and fine switches.

After some resistor origami, and installing the Constant Current Source Upgrade simultaneously, I was off to the races. (Notice the balanced pot is completely replaced as it is now redundant).





The updated face plate is also easy on the eyes.




After some weeks of listening, I still felt there was some hardness to the sound I did not gell with, and still a lack of resolution (compared to just Mainline). Realizing it was not a fair fight to compare stock caps in the pre to the vcap ODAM in the Mainline, I went ahead and ordered another pair of 10uf caps.

Luckily they fit nicely within the tighter confines of the Beepre 2 and were easy to install. (Don't worry, I later clipped the long leads).






After around 150 hours of burning...Ahhh, there we go. Oodles of detail and loads of plankton. I can again turn the volume up to stupid levels with little to no irritation. Micro and macro dynamics are stunning. Also, the treble is delicious. So much clarity and information up top with no sibilance.

This is what I was used to with just my Mainline, sans preamp. Finding a point were both matched each other performance-wise was my first goal.

I will need more time to pull together a detailed writeup on sonics, and hope to answer these questions...

1. Is Mainline better or worse with the Beepre included in chain?

2. How does Beepre perform with speakers?

 

Very cool!

I'm interested in replacing my SS pre with the BeePree 2 and Eros Phono. But, I'm really curious how it'd compare to high-end SS from yesteryear. In my case, this would be with a loud speaker setup.

I have the BH Crackatwoa for headphones and it is superb.