NO ONE who is attempting to fabricate and design was willing to share any information, parts, resources at all.
Agreed... With one big exception (I am aware of) and that was Richard, aka poorlyconditioned. He posted a couple of very useful schematics.
I wanted to do some prototyping with his schematics and play around but never got around to ordering the bits. The thing about protoyping is you really need to stock up on components.. Otherwise you're constantly going out for parts. And most of us don't have local stores that sell what we need so it comes down to ordering.
I think it might be very useful to put together a group order of those components (and some extras) as an 'active experiment kit'.. But Spring will soon be in the air so I imagine that will put a damper on things.
Chris, a buffer circuit is needed between the body and cap because caps can't drive the cable load. Power needs to be supplied to that buffer circuit.
Thats easy use a simple Fet and use a phantom voltage to feed it. Its just a matter of finding a good fet I like the Fairchild J201 with a 1 gigaohm resistor and 10 volts going to it.
That is as far as I got. I ordered some J201 fets and 1G resistors. I ordered two CK63 caps. I built a prototype, with aligator clips and a bunch of 9V batteries in series to generate the (60V) polarization voltage. I even had collettes machined here, but they did not work well becuase I had no nice way to connect to the middle pin (besides, they were aluminum, they should be brass instead). This is all in the previous thread, including photos and schematics.
I bailed out for two reasons. The first was stress/burnout. I wanted to get on with recording, and have been using CK91/93 with a simple battery box instead. (Hey, at least I didn't make promises or take money or gear before I went AWOL like some others here!) The second reason was I could not find a nice *mechanical* system to connect reliably to the capsules. Oh yeah, finally, I did not want to get in the business of building for others. I just wanted to provide information.
I'm hoping someone else takes what information I gave and runs with it. I, and many others would pay a reasonble price for this provided whoever makes it provides open information (schematics, etc) so DIY types can build as well. I think this forum/community can have both DIY and pre built units existing together.
Oh yeah, I spoke to ScheopsNbox (Nick) by Email and he provided *some* information. Apparantly he buys collettes (with FET) directly from Scheops and builds a box himself. But he did not provide much information about what was inside, aside from the fact that a bunch of alkaline batteries are used to provide the 60V polarization voltage. So, much like my ideas. Oh yeah, his box, with collettes, is more than $1000. I was hoping for a cheaper solution for the AKG.
Richard
PS: I should mention, that as Chris said, this is not mysterious at all. I got my ideas form studying the AKG service manuals (C451, C480). It is just a matter of putting it together and providing customer service, two things I'm not very good at...