I bought the L2A back in 2018 when it was still $30 I believe. I used it more than a few times but something always sounded off about the high end, there just wasn't enough detail. For $30 I couldn't be too upset, but I wanted to keep with the DIY route and see if I could upgrade the transformer to something a little nicer.

I sent the nice guys at Cinemag an email asking them if they have some sort of equivalent, and they recommended the one pictured. Another $30. I thought why not since I was bored and wanted a neat project (purchased in 2021and just never got around to it.

I removed the Edcor, and it was nightmare. About an hour of trying to use a solder sucker and slowly and gently try to prod it out. Installing it took 5 minutes.

I didn't test it right away with a reamp, but instead I did a nice little pink noise phase cancel test with both the before and after.

Pretty big results.

Green is the Edcor.

Red is the Cinemag.

I knew there was something up. Look at the MASSIVE dip in the 3k area in the old one. Pretty nuts. You can also see that the high end extends much higher. Problem solved and the tones that I have reamped sound back to life.

I'll post a clip soon of a reamp, just need to finish building my boost pedal and I'm good to go. Just wanted to share a quick and easy way to improve the DIYRE L2A. Thanks!

Be interesting to find the specs of the cinemag. Even though this circuit isn't technically correct to begin with.

I'm all for modding the L2A, I just wanted to jump in and correct the record about the stock unit. The graph in the first post is not what the frequency response of the L2A looks like. Rather, it's basically flat with a 1dB drop off after 10kHz. Here's a sweep for reference attached.

The signal path for the test was RME ADI-2 Pro line output > DIYRE L2A mkI > DIYRE 73P DI input > RME line input.