hifisonix

Category: Articles

  • Saturn V Rocket Performance Report

    Absolutely nothing to do with audio, but a great read for the techies. This performance report was pulled together in the late 1960’s by Walter Haeussermann , one of the German rocket scientists who went to the US after WWII, where he settled and went on to have a spectacularly successful career with NASA.  He…

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  • CFA Diamond Buffer IPS: Does it Operate in Class B or class A?

    There is a persistent assertion by small group of amplifier design practitioners that the diamond buffer input stage of CFA audio amplifier operates in class B (or AB) mode wherein there is a hard ‘handover’ between each half of the diamond buffer input stage as the input signal passes through 0V.  The most recent claim…

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  • Barney Oliver: Crossover Distortion in Class B Audio Amplifiers

    This is the famous analysis of class B amplifier cross-over distortion by the then head of HP Reasearch Labs, Dr. Barney Oliver,  published in the February 1971 edition of the HP Journal.  The  bias current Iq for a class B emitter follower amplifier is shown to be approximately  Iq = .026/(Re+re+(rb/hFE)). In practice,  – the…

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  • More Notes On Cascode Amplifier Oscillation

    Here is a short write up on cascode oscillation I did back in 2012 when designing and developing the e-Amp. Cascode Oscillation in Audio Amplifiers.pdf I recently (2017) had a recurrence of the problem on another high power design – some pictures are shown below.  When I went back and looked at the notes above,…

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  • Baxandall’s Original Tone Control Article from Wireless World 1952

    This article was published in October of 1952, when Baxandall was 31 years old, the design having already won him a prize 2 years earlier in a competition. His design basically relegated other tone control circuits to the scrap heap, although cheap passive, or non-inverting circuits still persisted well into the 1980’s, especially in low…

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  • Stan Curtis 60W Class A Amplifier from ETI

    Stan Curtis was involved in both engineering and management roles in companies like Quad, Cambridge, Rotel (a family owned Japanese brand) Mission and Lecson to name a few. He is primarily an audio business consultant and remains highly respected and a noted product designer within the sector in his own right. This is his 60…

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  • Low Cost Isolation Amplifier for Industrial Applications

    A Design Idea of mine that appeared in EDN around 2000.  The article appeared with the title ‘Lost Cost . . . ‘ – seems someone got a bit mixed up.  The idea has been referenced in a few papers on the web – always good to see! Low_cost_isolation_amplifier_suits_industrial_applications Here’s another one using a delta…

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  • Hifisonix UBx Universal JFET Buffer

    A while back, one of the diyAudio forum members who was building the nx-Amp (here’s the thread on DIYaudio.com) enquired about either reducing the amplifier’s overall gain, or providing a volume control facility. Since both the 15 W class A  sx-Amplifier and its bigger 100W sibling the nx-Amplifier, are Current Feedback Amplifiers, performance is quite…

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  • OPEX-1: A Discrete OPAMP for Audio

    This design showcases a discrete opamp for audio applications.  It features very low noise, low distortion and a class A output stage that will deliver 1ppm distortion into a 600 Ohm load at 12 V peak. OPEX-1-Discrete-Opamp

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  • Solid State Relay with PCB Layout

    A complete relay that is smaller than a Tyco RT series EMR Simple_solid_state_relay_Updated  . This design uses a small double sided PCB and some SMD components. Here are the Gerber files SSLR.  The recomended mosfets for this design are the  PSMN4R3-100PS[1] for supply rails of up to +-50 V absolute maximum, and for supply rails of up…

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