DIY Audio friends, welcome to my page
In this page you will find audio designs that I have built in the last 20 years.
I started electronic builds a long time ago, in the mid-1960s.
I was born in Athens, Greece and have lived there all my life.
As a high school student in 1964 listening to amateur radio stations I got the desire to get involved with electronics. During school I found physics very interesting, especially the area of electricity and its laws.
I started making friends with older amateurs to get into the secrets of building medium wave transmitters.
Back then there were very few electronics shops in Athens. The main one was Radio Karagiannis on Praxitelous street on an upper floor of an old apartment building.
Baven and Katoumas, two former employees of Radio Karagiannis, later opened a shop in Lekas street.
There was also the Ulkeroglou store in the Felizol arcade, behind the Kolokotronis statue, the Karalis store in Karitsi square next to Mousouri Theatre, and Bourniotis in Glastonos street. Later Venieris opened in Veranzerou street.
I bought my first valves from these shops, 6L6, 6V6, GZ34, 5R4 and started my first electronic builds with meagre means (my mother’s scissors as a drill, a basic soldering iron, and a baker’s pan turned upside down as an aluminium chassis).
My first pirate radio station had a 6L6 output tube and a 6V6 oscillator, which I later changed to 807, 6146, 2 parallel 6146 and finally an 813 at 2,000 Volts.
I say finally because before completing the power supply for the 813, which was the most expensive part, during my last year of high school, the regime in Greece changed to a dictatorship. As a result all pirate radio stations were banned with severe penalties at that time.
After that I entered the Polytechnic university and left behind the high frequency transmitters. My interest switched to audio designs and I constructed some integrated monophonic valve amplifiers and speakers.
Family years followed, as well as work as an engineering manager in the design and maintenance of petrol outlets in Shell oil. Other hobbies included extreme windsurfing between 1980 and 1994, cycling, photography, car racing, motorbikes, computers starting from Spectrum to the early days of the internet in the 1990s.
The turning point was in 1995 when after a party my son burned a transistor power amplifier I had previously built: Tiger 01 (predecessor of Bryston 3B). When replacing the broken amplifier I caught the bug again to start building audio equipment.
Since then I’ve been involved with my initial hobby making several audio designs that I would like to share.
In all my builds the chassis design and layout are my own, using specialised software and sourcing hi end parts from shops from all around the world.
Thank you and welcome to my site.
Special thanks to my first cousin Antonis Marinos, who created this website as well as helping with many other projects.