One of the acrylic guard pieces on my Aune T1 MK2 snapped!

Q: One of the acrylic guard pieces on my Aune T1 MK2 snapped when I was trying to remove them. What do I do?

A: Snapped how? They are supposed to come off easy.

Snapped where? If the little tab at the bottom of the acrylic U snapped, you may have a small piece of acrylic rattling around in your enclosure. It's probably not going to short anything out but you may want to pull it out one day.

If the U shaped arm snapped, well, you should find solace in the fact that the T1 looks even better without the acrylic guards.

You may also want to consider modding a metal cage like I have seen some others do. 

Scratchy Aune

Q:  Whenever I turn on my Aune T1, I get serious distortion/static for the first 20-30 minutes until it fully warms up. I've tried several different headphones, I've tried leaving cans plugged in when I turn it on and I've tried waiting until after the T1 turns on to plug in. 

Nothing seems to make a difference, everything is static-y and awful sounding for the first 30 minutes or so, then it'll slowly go away and sound fine.

Am I doing something stupid, or do I have a faulty amp?

A: Try cleaning the tube contacts and rods. Isopropyl alcohol or (even better) Deoxit will work.

If your Aune T1 still sounds scratchy, try swapping the tube.

If still an issue, the finger of suspicion next points towards your PSU brick.

Aune T1 tube rolling tips

Q: What tubes should I get for my Aune T1?

A: A common-sense rule of thumb is: don't spend more on your tubes than you did on the amp :-)
in general NOS (new old stock) tubes are better choices than reissues, but some NOS especially Amperex and old Genalex tubes can get plenty expensive very quickly.

Many resissue tubes are manufactured by New Sensor Corporation, and their price may be dramatically marked up by tube stores. When it comes to buying tubes, patience is always a virtue, especially when it comes to deals!

Is the Aune T1 Mk2 worth it?

The Aune T1 Mk1 was constantly dropping on Massdrop for $130. Recently, it has been supplanted by the Aune T1 Mk2 with a sale price of $170. So what changed, apart from $40?

It's hard to find information about the T1 Mk2. The Shenzen Audio website says "T1 MK2 amp can bar the use of an enlarged portion of the gain OP + BUF". Um OK..... Maybe Google Translate was having a bad day when it did that particular translation.

In sum, the T1 Mk 2 got a new power supply and a new USB chip to allow asynchronous transfer and reduce jitter (from pictures of the internals, it looks like a SA9027 Savi controller, which is pretty much a bottom-of-the-barrel chip).

Is that worth $40 more? Probably not. At $170 I can't really recommend this as a price-performance steal anymore.

But then Massdrop threw in a Genalex Gold Lion tube too, for free. Sounds tempting, right? But before you pull the trigger, consider this:

This isn't the old Genalex Gold Lion from the 40s and 50s made by the Marconi-Osram Valve Company (they have long gone the way of the dodo and the great auk) but the "reissue" Genalex, which is made by New Sensor corp, who took over the old Reflektor plant and is now churning out OEM tubes under the ElectroHarmonix, Genalex, TungSol, Sovtek, Tesla, and even [shudder] the Mullard brand names. The 6922 versions of these tubes are essentially the same design, merely with different brand names printed on them. So the stock ElectroHarmonix tubes that come with the Aune T1 Mk1 are made in the same Reflektor plant that these Genalex tubes are made in.

So you may ask, how is it that some reviewers try a reissue Genalex or a rebadged Sovtek 6922 and report such a vast difference in sound quality in comparison to whatever they had before, if all these tubes are OEM? Unless they are getting the original NOS tubes, your guess is as good as mine.

If you want to roll tubes for Aune T1, IMO do it properly. Get the Mk1 for $130 (even though it does not have asynchronous data transfer) and with the $40 you save, get some real NOS tubes. You can get genuine Mullard ECC88/6922 tubes for $15-20 each, or a genuine cold war-era Russian Voskhod for $10 or thereabouts. Or spring for a NOS Amperex Bugle Boy which should cost you less than $40 if you are patient. Heck, you could even get a genuine Genalex from the 50s for under $40.

Does an expensive DAC make a difference?

Q: Does an expensive DAC make a difference?

A: Most sigma delta DAC chips sound so similar it is hard to tell them apart. The sound the DAC puts out is also influenced by the analog circuitry, which may or may not be significant. Since many DACs try to be "transparent", i.e/ to add or take away nothing from the signal, you are not going to see a huge difference between them, despite their cost. So for example an ODAC sounds very similar to a Benchmark DAC1.

There are 3 exceptions:

1) some manufacturers go our of their way to "tune" the sound of their dac, typically by using the analog circuit to modify the sound, for example the warm sound of the Cambridge Audio DACMagic 100 or the Micromega MyDAC.

2) An NOS DAC often sounds very different than regular sigma delta DACs, mainly because the DAC chip itself i very different.

3) Some DACs add a filter to the output stage to modify the sound. This filter can be a tube, for example the Aune T1. The tube does not really act as a tube (i.e. for amplification) but serves to distort the signal in a pleasing way. Therefore these DACs sound different.

So it's not the price of the DAC per se, but which category it falls under that ultimately determines the sound it generates.

In general headphones and amps make much more different to sound than DACs. But DACs make a bigger difference than cables.

Aune Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Q: So I recently bought an Aune T1 and upon trying it out for the first time I realized that the sound cuts out every few seconds for about 1/4 to 1/2 a second. After further listening I discovered that the amp completely disappeared from my computer's list of playback devices after about 5 minutes. I've tried plugging it into different USB ports on my motherboard, and even tried a different USB cable but I keep getting the same issue.

A: The Aune T1 is a budget option that has had its share of reliability issues.

If the sounds cuts out intermittently for short periods, the first thing to consider is distortion known as clipping (which occurs when an amplifier is driven to excess, and tries to output more than it can), but that should not cause you to lose the USB connection.

It does not look like the issue is a bad USB port on your motherboard.

I would first go into computer>properties and prevent your USB from sleeping. If the issue still exists, try connecting the Aune to a different computer. The T1 has a Tenor USB chip that should be plug and play. If it intermittently loses connection with all computers, I think you might have gotten one with a bad chip.

If it works well with a different computer, I would reload Win drivers (or try running the T1 with ASIO drivers)