£5 Tripath TA2024 Amplifier

The Tripath TA2024 has a cult following after it appear in the Sonic Impact T-amp and gained a lot of acclaim. The favourite chips in this genre are the TA2024 with 11 watts into 4 ohm, the TA2020 with around 20 watts, and TK2050 with 50watts - all very efficient switching-based class D amps. There is a large modding scene and a lot of small companies selling boards using these chips with high-quality components. A Ta2024 board can be had for around £5 delivered from ebay and just needs a 12v supply providing a couple of amps to get it going - the components are as cheap as it gets but they sound great! I mounted mine in a small project box with a volume pot and some cheapo gold connectors. I played around with some different input caps and replaced the power caps with much bigger ones - I found it sounded good with 2.2uF electrolytics (as Tripath suggest in the data sheets) and gave a reasonable amount of  bass.