Want to build my own equipment.

Sounds like you have the talent, skill and inspiration. Can't tell if you have the technical background / education. If you have that, then all you need is time, money and test equipment. Quality reference units would be a help too.

If you have never actually built a piece of equipment before, I highly recommend you start with kits, as others have said. You may even find that they give you all the satisfaction you are looking for.

Here's another source :

Bottlehead

You might have a look here http://www.passdiy.com/ and the pass labs forum here http://www.diyaudio.com/ to get some good ideas.

I don’t know why you want to do that. If you enjoy building things, that is fine. But it is very difficult to build something that can better the high-end commercial products.

I was a DYIer in the 70s’ and 80s’ and I used to own an Audio Research SP6A preamp. In the good old days, the user manual of the preamp came with complete schematic and part list. So I built a few clones for my friends, each one was a little different and included what I considered “improvements”. But no matter what I did, none of the clones sounded as good as the original.

The reason was two words: measuring equipment. I had a cheap scope, a DIY signal generator, and a multi-meter. But in order to fine tune the amp, you need precision measuring equipment, which costs about the same as a complete high-end audio system.

Dont let these people get you down. You can build gear for a fraction of the price if you have even basic knowledge and some good books on the subject.

You might not be able to build the best without the right test gear, but you can make Amps that will easily surpass Adcom, and you can build speakers that sound like speakers purchased for 2-3 times the cost.

Talk to other DIY'ers, It looks like a daunting task, but all in all it is not all that complicated to make a good loudspeaker or amplifier.

Remember, even the best audio engineers and loudspeaker designers started somewhere.

Almost every audio company started out as a DIY project in somone's garage.

Just set realistic goals, accomplish them, research more, set a higher goal, and continue so on and so forth.

One thing to not be surprised about. If you use quality parts throughout you might find you wind up spending a lot more money than you intended to spend on your "DIY" project. Having said that you also might come up with an amplifier you might keep the rest of your life. I am having an electrical engineer build me a 4 chassis 300b SET amp with close to the best parts available (without going crazy on silver wired transformers). The final cost will be around 3000 for parts and labour. That is still less than the least expensive Audio Note 300B SET amplifier and mine will be a much better amplifier than the Audio Note.

Real cheap DIY means you get a cheap product; just like buying real cheap stuff at retail. Buy quality stuff for DIY and you might wind up with a better product than retail for a little less money. And you learn something in the process.