Fatman status (in Chennai):
Capt. Rajesh kindly arranged through FM Kannan for the Fatman iTube tube-buffered gainclone to be loaned to me to investigate possible component upgrades.
This is similar to the Dared MP-5, but with dual line-level inputs, instead of a built-in DAC as in the Dared MP-5:
https://6moons.com/industryfeatures/dared/dared.html
It seems to be the same 6N1P tube and ST TDA7265 gainclone stages in both, as well as a 6E2 magic eye as the VU meter. The tubes are NOS Voskhod 6N1P, also available from diyaudiocart in Chennai, so it's relatively easy to find spares for now:
https://diyaudiocart.com/Voskhod-Factory-6N1P-Vacuum-Tube
It arrived in the late last evening, so I was just able to unbox and do a brief auditioning yesterday.
For preliminary auditioning, I used my ~20 year old AD-500B DVD player (with the analog signal-path heavily modded to use my LF03c dual discrete opamp) to play Redbook Audio CDs. Speakers are generic 2-way bass-reflex bookshelves which I built with imported drivers about a decade ago. First impressions - the Fatman is warm, full-bodied and transparent sounding, but a little bass-shy and has some glare/brightness in the upper-mids compared to my reference MiniRef 1875 nested gainclone.
Some simple upgrades of passives may be sufficient to tame the glare - it has generic 1/2W CFRs and generic Chinese electrolytics everywhere. The volume control is a cheap A100K dual-gang pot, which could be substituted with something better like a Panasonic or Alps.
It nevertheless sounds great as a small bookshelf / study setup. A fairly remarkable amp for its price point - Dared introduced it way back in 2005, very soon after the introduction of the iPod and the concept of iPod docking - probably way ahead of its time, and maybe destined to be a timeless classic. The use of the 6E2/EM87 magic eye as the VU meter is a brilliant nod to vintage-tube aesthetics.
Possible approaches to cloning it: perhaps a E180F tube-buffered MiniRef with NOS BEL EM84 as the VU meter. It's hard to match the production finish of the original Dared/Fatman, though - bright chrome-plated panels, heavy-gauge construction, heavy mains trafo, etc. The Dared version also apparently used premium passives including Allen-Bradley carbon-composition resistors and Japanese electrolytics, some of which will be hard to find locally today.
If anybody plans to get one of these, I'd advise going with the Dared- or Fatman-branded version with the through-hole mounted components on the SMOBC PCB with yellowish solder mask. The through-hole version is easier to mod. The newer versions of this unit use a green solder-masked PCB with SMD components, and that will be harder to mod (no idea how it sounds, though - the reviews seem to indicate that the Dared version is the best-sounding of the lot). The original MP-5 had a built-in DAC, while the current MP-5BT has both a DAC and Bluetooth input. The Fatman iTube has no DAC or BT, but 2 line-level inputs, which is actually the most useful for me (for A-B comparisons of sources, etc.)
Thanks again to Capt. Rajesh and FM Kannan.
(End of Part 1. )
