tangent
Top Mall-Fi poster. The T in META42.
Formerly with Tangentsoft Parts Store
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2001
- Posts
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Quote:
It's a game to grab the gullible.
The term "linear" alone is almost useless. It just means that all the parts involved are linear: R's, C's, L's, and if there are active electronics, they're used in analog fashion. An unregulated supply is a "linear" supply: you've got two big L's, one big C, and a diode bridge which is a analog if you squint a bit. In practice, the only thing "linear" rules out are digital and switching type techniques.
"Regulated" is also too often misunderstood. There are a whole lot of regulation techniques, none of which give the same results. (If they all gave the same results, we'd have discarded all but one of them, yes?) Even the cheapest, nastiest little switch-mode power supply is "regulated". It just means that some effort is made to keep the output voltage relatively steady in the face of input variations.
Even the combination "linear regulated" doesn't automatically mean "clean power". There's still plenty of room for discrimination. If you want to know how clean a power supply is, you have to measure it.
Originally Posted by slowpogo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Why four separate web sites are falsely selling it as "linear" if it's so clearly not is beyond me. |
It's a game to grab the gullible.
The term "linear" alone is almost useless. It just means that all the parts involved are linear: R's, C's, L's, and if there are active electronics, they're used in analog fashion. An unregulated supply is a "linear" supply: you've got two big L's, one big C, and a diode bridge which is a analog if you squint a bit. In practice, the only thing "linear" rules out are digital and switching type techniques.
"Regulated" is also too often misunderstood. There are a whole lot of regulation techniques, none of which give the same results. (If they all gave the same results, we'd have discarded all but one of them, yes?) Even the cheapest, nastiest little switch-mode power supply is "regulated". It just means that some effort is made to keep the output voltage relatively steady in the face of input variations.
Even the combination "linear regulated" doesn't automatically mean "clean power". There's still plenty of room for discrimination. If you want to know how clean a power supply is, you have to measure it.