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Take it easy Tangent Sensei! |
Center your mind, my student. The path to audiophile nirvana lies through the Cmoy and beyond, even unto the mystical lands of Jung and Shockley. Meditate upon this wisdom, child. Aaaaahhhoooooohhhmmmmmmm......
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I am having a hard enough time looking at the original design |
At risk of having you think I'm continuing the mystical nonsense too far...the CMoy is both simple and complex. It took me a couple of months to wrap my head around the interactions among all the parts. Let it come to you in its own time -- ignore what you don't understand now, and latch onto anything that looks like a fact and then investigate it. The pieces will all fall into place one by one until one day it will all snap into place in your mind and you'll start sneering about how trivial the circuit is.
(The irony is, if the CMoy is so trivial, why does it take N months to figure it out?)
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got the Analog Devices kit...now how to get the DIPs? |
One word:
BrownDog (or is that two words?)
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Caps...okay that I can handle...more storable voltage right? |
Ummmm, sort of. Capacitors store "charge", like a battery. You can charge them up to a particular voltage, and you can discharge them into a load, giving a particular amperage. The larger the power caps, the bigger the charge reservoir, which keeps the op-amp fed when it needs lots of current quickly. If the battery can't keep up with the op-amp's demands, the power caps start discharging until the battery catches up or the op-amp's demands ease up. Bass is the biggest consumer of current in an amplifier, so larger power caps improve the deepness and tautness of the bass line.
The signal caps (C1 in the amp section) are an entirely different ball game. Best to leave that one until later -- stick with the default value or maybe a bit bigger and just take it on faith that it needs to be there and that it does useful things.
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wouldn't boosting the caps at the power supply suck more juice from the battery? |
When you turn the amp on, the battery does have to put out a lot of current for a short time to charge the power caps up. The bigger the caps, the longer they take to charge up. Then when you turn the amp off, the caps discharge to ground through the power supply's resistor divider. In between these two stages, the caps are just acting as charge reservoirs -- discharging a bit as necessary and charging back up when the load eases. Caps aren't perfectly efficient, of course, but it's not worth worrying about.
The discharge to ground at power off is technically wasteful, but as long as you're not turning the amp on and off a hundred times a day, this loss is also ignorable.