CD WARS

OR

DIY AUDIO CD PLAYER BY JOHN

Click Here For Several Assembly Photos

This is the TU-876CD Kit from EleKit of Japan. The TU-876 was manufactured solely for the year 2001 and is no longer being offered for sale. Still some retail outlets around Japan may still have some in stock. Mine was purchased from here.

Total cost plus shipping was about 27,000 Yen which is right around the $240-$250 price range depending on the exact yen rate. Delivery time within Japan was around 2 days.

The kit was a breeze to install but because the instructions were in Japanese I had a little trouble following the wire color codes as the drawings are black and white and the colors were represented by text, Japanese Text, Kanji to be exact. The wire was about 18 AWG PVC insulated and had I thought it through well I’d have just wired everything with white 20 AWG Teflon insulated hook up wire. The drawing is very clear and color codes aren’t necessary.

Also I made a couple minor mistakes and actually soldered the tube socket on the wrong side of the circuit board. The picture titled populated.jpg on this page shows the tube socket on the WRONG SIDE. D’oh!

Installation took exactly 8 hours, with a couple 10 minute breaks, and a three year old girl running around wanting daddy’s attention on Saturday morning. I only used my Japanese wife to help me label the drawing to indicate the proper colors used for the wiring. As I said before, if you just use the excellent drawing and some wire markers you should probably go with a higher quality hook up wire and color shouldn’t be an issue. Also my wife had to point out to me that the hook up wire was all to be cut to 35 centimeters in length. (13.75 inches roughly).

Sound quality seems to wildly exceed any of my other off the shelf CD players, and of course tube rolling is possible. Right now I’m using an RCA Clear Top 12AU7 as the output.

If you have any questions please send me an email here.

When in Doubt, Build It Yourself!