A little while back I made up an adapter for the PLS153 so I could use a GAL22V10 in its place providing the JED file was reworked.
I made the adapter on veroboard but now I can do basic prototyping using copper clad boards I thought id make a proper one up.

The design only took 5 or so minutes in Eagle CAD and after a quick sanity check I printed and transferred it to a board.

And a little while later it was etched and time to drill this thing out.

I fitted sockets where needed and took a few comparison photos with the old proto one.

(or is it GAL2PLS?)

Time to run the game, works perfect. Im happy with this, I can now replace these parts reliably should I need to.

Taking my new found interest in all things Sinclair a little further I have got hold of a copy of this book.

From what little Ive read so far its seems very interesting and about my level too.

Got myself a couple of these SID replacements today.

I first saw them around April this year but have not been available to buy until now.
As you can see they are around the same size as the original and my first impressions are very good.

There are 2 jumpers on these.
The top one needs to be removed for older C64’s. It has something to do with resistor R3 and bring the volume level up.
The lower one is to switch between 6581 and 8580 emulation. A switch could also be added here to switch between then on-the-fly.

To test these against an original 6581 I used the SIDPlay program running from SD2IEC and fed both the samples into a PC to record them.
The most noticeable difference for me is the volume level on the original is far higher and I also think its a better, cleaner sound BUT as the SID chips are now going for stupid money by opportunists on eBay then this is a really nice alternative and one that will come in very handy in the future for many people.
Here are the .WAV files. Ive not converted these in any way, they were taken using Sound Recorder app that comes with Windows XP. The samples were taken directly after each other and no settings were altered at all.

Real SID
Nano SID