I tried etching the board I posted, thinking I would build the power supply and test how well it tracks, then redesign later with big polygon traces everywhere. However, long story short, I didn't reserve enough space for my heatsinks, so I couldn't assemble the board. It was also the first...

  Quote:   Damn, this is kind of sad to hear.  I might just build it anyway since I still have enough board left to etch a second design. If it ends up being terrible like yours I can come up with something different. Thanks for the heads up though; now it will be a lot less infuriating...

b0ng0,   I didn't look at this extremely closely, but I noticed a few things:   1) You have a lot of dull grey solder joints   This is indicative of a "cold solder job."  Basically the solder didn't uniformly reach the proper temperature before cooling. Also it seems to me like all...

As promised, here is the initial design.     Schematic It's basically the exact same thing that can be found on page 7 of the LT1033 datasheet, where it is described as a "dual tracking 3A supply."     Components C1-C4 are 2200uF electrolytics. R1,R2 are 1.3ohms rated for...

Ah, thanks for the insight guys.  It actually looks like my initial guess of 65mil traces wasn't far off.  With 1oz pour, and permitting only a 10 degree temperature rise necessiates traces of 55mil.    Is there really any reason I shouldn't just make traces as thick as I possibly can while...

I'm trying to decide how thick to make my traces in a power supply I'm building using Radioshack's two sided PCB.  The thing is, it doesn't say on the packaging what the fill weight is.  Here's the product I have:   http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102495      ...

  Quote:   Thanks! This actually makes a lot of sense; treating the caps as batteries did the trick for me.       Quote:   Unfortunately I'm trying to build this supply on a shoestring budget so I'm using an old Bando transformer I pulled out of an amplifier in high...

Thanks for the knowledge guys.    Is it fair to say that I need to attach the signal ground in this power supply to the real earth ground then? I just don't see where excited electrons (current) would go after travelling through my headphones otherwise.  It seems to me that the ground in...

I guess my question is summed up by the title pretty well.  I already have an LM317-based supply that I built as a kid. Long story short, it doesn't work that well and I'm going to rebuild it. It makes sense to just go for a bipolar supply since I pretty much exclusively work with audio.   I...

Quote: My motherboard audio claims the same thing. We probably even have the same audio chipset, the Realtek ALC892. I just got an external audio interface and I used it with Rightmark to measure my onboard sound and it was pretty unimpressive.  The noise is about 25dB higher and the...

Quote:   This isn't really related, but what is the giant heatsink for? Did you bias your TPA6120 into class A?     -Kris

It sounds like you have pretty much solved your noise issue so concerning where to go next:   Quote: I made almost exactly this my second build. I did it on protoboard with 22 guage wires, a star ground, and miscellanesous small caps to ensure stability. I used the OPA633 instead of...

I did some real reading on the merits of real ground. I found a number of sources that suggested it was the right way to go (not just the O2 site). I even encountered some of your older posts here on head-fi which were all pretty informative.   However, I still have a question about...

    Quote:   Thanks for the link! These designs looked like class A designs which I don't really have the juice to run. I noticed while following the links that Ti had run some benchmarks on the Millet Hybrid with the discrete buffer, the OPA551, and BUF634.  It looks like the diamond...

I've embarked on an amplifier design journey that is probably going to take me to something very similar to the pimeta. I'm currently thinking I want a 3 channel (active ground) design. One of the issues you seem to have to wrestle with is how to get your ground channel to sink the current...