John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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Richard, VAS is the best BJT available. The bias certainly affect 'kinks', here is with 300 mA.
Damir


Thank you. I came to the 200mA after some study with distortion vs idle.

It gets the heat sink fairly warm. So, we will stay with 200Ma... the sim is great and fast. Looks perfect... no kinks.

Lesson learned -- It would appear that setting bias via thd minimum is still effective way.



THx-RNMarsh
 
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I remember having first seen this use of a stereo set to measure the output impedance of an amplifier in an AP publication (named audio.tst) back in ~1990/1991, but i don´t know if they or someone else invented it.

Here is a chunk from my Audio Amateur HK-12 article from 1981.
 

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Good stuff there rayma, thanks, Keith-snook took a lot of time and effort to write that up.

And of course George is a never ending source of amazement with the resources he finds.
Well at least all of the resources except the ONE he couldn't find of the composit pictutre
of the worlds most infamous dictators. :( and I was in Athens at the time. Parakahlo :)
 
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Wanting to know how well a Blowtorch-like topology built with lower gm FETs might perform, we went ahead to get hold of and matched a bunch of 2SJ106Ys, 2SK208Ys and 2SK209GRs.
The frontend diff pair is biased at 1mA, the IV resistor is 15k, and the output is buffered by a pair of 2SK209GR source followers.

Performance exceeds my expectation, especially the low output noise.
And most important it was a lot of fun.

;)


Patrick
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The FET models are already in the Spice file.

There is no point in specifying the resistor values as they depend on the Idss of the devices as well as the desired gain.
For our test build, we chose FETs for the gain block around 2.5mA, and degenerated them to 1mA.
The exception is the output source follower, which have Idss~5mA, but the exact value is not important.
As already mentioned, the IV resistor is 15k, and the resistor between the front end diff pair is trimmed to the required gain.
In our case, we used a gain of 10.


Patrick
 
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