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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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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X-Altra Mini One Line Preamplifier

The X-Altra Mini One is a simple line preamplifer based on the National Semiconductor LM4562 (also known as the LME49720) that I built around 2008 and which served me well until about 2014 when it was replaced with newer more sophisticated designs. Nevertheless, this simple preamp sounded very good, and thanks to the LM4562 (which […]

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Hifisonix Solid State Loudspeaker Relay

  On big power amplifiers, conventional electromechanical relays leave much to be desired when it comes to their ability to reliably switch fault level currents in the event of a catastrophic amplifier fault. In a worst case situation (and I speak from experience), one of the output devices fails short circuit, placing the full amplifier rail voltage across the loudspeaker terminals. Relay […]

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