====== Nobels ODR-1 ======
With original units being offered for ridiculous prices I got triggered to build myself one of these for a fraction of the cost. So I set out on a great adventure as this build proved to be more difficult than I initially thought.

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After having finished it I rocked it before I boxed it. No sound. Nothing. Even after some thorough debugging I couldn't figure out what could be possibly wrong. So I shelved it. This was back in January 2025.

Almost one and a half year later I decided to give it another go. First I replaced the film capacitors that were marked as electrolytics on the layout. No idea why I initially decided to replace those with film caps in the first place. That didn't make a difference though. Then I started going over the board meticulously. I quickly discovered several errors from a badly placed cap to wrong resistor and capacitor values. Somehow I managed to replace the 560 pF with a 56 pF cap and the 15K caps on the top right were definitely 150K ones on my board. Not sure in what kind of state I initially build this board but one thing's for sure, I wasn't paying enough attention. 

Hooked the board up to my test rig again and lo and behold, it worked! And how, this thing sounds awesome! Next challenge was boxing it though. The board does fit inside a 1590B but some of the bigger caps were slightly too high so had to either bend them or replace them with SMD versions. When that was done I literally crammed the board inside the enclosure with the bottom of the vero board facing upwards as that was the only way I could get it to fit, applied a lot of hot glue to prevent the bottom of the board making contact with the bottom plate, put the bottom plate back again and screwed it tight to never open it again.

Definitely going to build me another one of these now that I'm better prepared. Got a lot of help from Sea Lemon with her album Diving For A Prize while debugging this one. Layout from [[https://dirtboxlayouts.blogspot.com/2021/07/nobels-odr-1.html|Dirtbox Layouts]].

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