RIAA Equalizer Amplifier Design

This article explores the fundamental’s of phono amplifier design,  culminating in a few practical designs. Special emphasis is placed on overload margins (critical if you want good sonics from your EQ amp), driving the EQ network adequately and noise. RIAA Equalization Amplifiers V2.0 Below is the RIAA Calculator Excel spread sheet.  Please read the article above, […]

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Solid State Feedback Amplifiers: A Short History

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland     A Future Without Feedback by Martin Colloms There is no mysticism in amplifier design, just serious science. —Andrey A. Danilov Introduction You will recall from the The Theory of TIM by Matti Otala elsewhere on this site, […]

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Hifisonix ‘Symphony’ Line Preamplifier

I designed and built this preamplifier while living in Taiwan a few years ago. The Symphony preamp features Baxandall tone controls, up to 7 inputs,  a class A 2 W headphone amplifier and a Goldpoint 24 position attenuator.  The write-up describes the design process and choices in some detail and my listening impressions: Part 1 […]

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Ovation e-Amp: A 180 Watt Class AB VFA Featuring Ultra Low Distortion

The e-Amp is a 180 Watt RMS (very conservatively rated into 8 Ω ) fully balanced symmetrical (‘FBS’) amplifier featuring an emitter follower triple (EFT) bipolar output stage and beta enhanced VAS stage. The amplifier can be configured using jumpers for TMC (Transitional Miller Compensation) or straight Miller compensation (MC). The VAS can be lightly […]

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Ovation 250 Power Amplifier

The Ovation 250: A 250W per Channel Audio Power Amplifer (updated 1st June 2013) This amplifier was built in 2005/2006 and this write-up originally published in 2009. Introduction Diy Audio is a wonderful activity:-  if  you cannot  afford a $10 000  power amp,   you can always  build  one that comes pretty damn  close in terms of  sonics  […]

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Douglas Self’s 8 Distortions and a Few More

(pictured above is the hifisonix 180 Watt per channel e-Amp) No one had codified all the major audio amplifier distortion mechanisms until  Douglas Self published the first edition of his ‘Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook’ or APAD’ as it has become known, in 1996.  He used a standard Lin* topology amplifier and then proceeded to […]

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