So Just How Quiet is Your Phono Stage?

You may be in for a surprise: actually not that quiet! The reason of course is that the cartridge inductance and resistance dominate the noise in any decent phono amp. To get the best in terms of noise performance, you really need to keep the input referred noise voltage and noise current to a minimum. […]

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Noise in Electronic Circuits

I’ve gathered a few articles here on noise as a go-to reference for anyone interested in the subject. These articles really focus on Johnson noise and not induced noise which is discussed in depth in the ‘Ground Loops’ post elsewhere on this site. I will update this post with new material as and when it […]

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Richard Lee’s Ultra-Low Noise MC Head Amp

This design was a development of Marshall Leach’s MC head-amp from the 1970’s and to my knowledge, Richard Lee’s implementation presented here has not been bested in terms of noise – about 280pV/rt Hz in a well implemented exemplar. Importantly, it requires only about 12mA current in the +-15V rail powered version, and about a […]

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Opamp Noise Visualizer

This Excel spread sheet tool was developed from one by Steve Hagman (www.AnalogHome.com) and allows en and ien data for up to 7 opamps to be compared.  When using the tool, make sure you enter comparable data – so for example,  always use the same frequency to make the comparison.  I normally use 1 kHz […]

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