John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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Hi Richard,
Yes, what you are doing and have done will improve life for a village if you look years into the future. Of course this also benefits you as you can look back on it with great satisfaction. You made a difference in the world and the people in the village know it.

It's up to people like Wally to actually try the filtering. They don't have to report what they actually observed of course. So there is no risk to their ego over this test. Education.

-Chris
 
I thought the FirstWatt projects weren't very low PSRR?

True, and easily measurable distortions. You should be careful Papa wears a white hat and has a BIG posse.

I'm thinking of trying a version of Mark's M2 project since I have some old MOSFET output stages on heatsinks lying around. In the past I was not happy with a pair of 6L6's driven with an interstage step up transformer for gain, but I might get better results with this. This has it all no PSRR, auto-transformer step up, coupling capacitors.
 
no quantifiers
... the -130dB distortion crowd
I am sure that with your experience as an audio designer, your perfect objectivity and your (real) deep knowledge, you will publish your scientific and extensive study about the thresholds of audibility of signal/noise, HD, IM, phases and bandwidth etc.. of the human race.
You will have your name in the audio hall of fame, near the ones of Fletcher and Munson, a Page in Wikipedia,
and I will light a candle in your honor because you will save a lot of time of the little that I have left to live.

As for Nelson, there is some reasons why he is called "Papa".
- He is famous for its "good sounding" designs, some very far from the old worn roads that seem the only ones allowed here. With sucessful results.
- He is open minded, curious, benevolent and friendly, never try to contemptuously reduce people as members of a "crowd".
- He never(for what I have seen) try to walk out of his competency domain, never try to impose his points of view, neither try to hold a guru position in front of a troop of admiring inexperienced handymen.
- He use his ears that seems totally logical when it is about "Audio".
(The Second sentence of the Wikipedia page about him:)
"Pass is vocal that listening tests remain valuable and that electrical measurements alone do not fully characterize the sound of an amplifier"
- He could be my dad if i was not older than him ;-)
 
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To resume the situation.
At least 4 people here (including-me) had tried this kind of filter. More if we include people that had experienced to battery power their sources.
They all noticed and/or measured improvements in their system.
We are still waiting for any measurements. So far all sighted testing and therefore unfortunately anecodatal. Howie is the odd one out here.


And this is well known and used by a lot of people all over the world, including in the professional area, since decades. The causes and effects totally explained, perfectly understood according to the established laws of physics.
The negative effects of the pollution in the AC is so well known than even the law sets a maximum allowed threshold of AC pollution for an electrical device to be authorized.
So by your reasoning as long as everything in the house has been made since 2000 or so there is not issue as it meets the legal requirements.


-
The usual 7 naysayers, never never listened, never measured, never even seen one of them.
They are drooling on the floor, joking about-it with the same old jokes, making, as usual, a lot of noise.
One of the 7 uses batteries, another is about to use batteries. Another lives in the **** end of beyond and has very clean power.


Note zero measurements have been given for the efficacy of big hunks of iron in a normal domestic environment for home audio. none, nada, zip.
 
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I am sure that with your experience as an audio designer, your perfect objectivity and your (real) deep knowledge,)


Scott is an amazingly experienced designer, just his fields are way above the requirements of audio. I hear his mic preamp is not too shabby though and Walt Jung does credit him with the critical piece for his composite line stage, so a few crumbs of audio there. Jneutron OTOH knows way too much about everything and I am convinced he is an alien trying to drag human science to the point where he can make enough dilithium to get his craft out of hock in roswell.



His point was that the Pass labs guys don't sweat -130dBc measurements. Nelson is open about wanting a 'nice' sound and interesting topologies to get there. He accepts it's entertainment, Richard seems to think it's dialysis.
 
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Good question.

Talking about PSRR improvement, you may want to read the seminal work of Sackinger. It will cost you only a low noise reference voltage to get an extra degree of freedom and simultaneously improve the PSRR and the CMRR, which are otherwise coupled. No iron required.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8218/648f2545b184175fcfe64c7a755acc3d95a1.pdf


That has matrices in it, you won't get many people to read that, despite it being (at least to me) rather interesting.
 
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I'm thinking of trying a version of Mark's M2 project since I have some old MOSFET output stages on heatsinks lying around. ... This has it all no PSRR, auto-transformer step up, coupling capacitors.

No PSRR? I think you might have forgotten that there are no common source (or common emitter) stages in the FirstWatt M2. It is a 3 stage amp:
Stage1: Complementary JFET (push pull) source follower. Supply = drain.

Stage2: Transformer. No connection to supply.

Stage 3: Complementary MOSFET (push pull) source follower. Supply = drain.
PSRR is completely determined by the output conductance "gds" in the two follower stages. It's actually pretty good, because each follower drives a low impedance load. Each follower's effect upon PSRR is a simple resistive divider with (large) 1/gds as the upper resistor and (small) Rload as the lower resistor. So there is quite a bit of attenuation from supply noise input, to follower output. I.e. good PSRR.

Certainly there exist FirstWatt amps that use common source output stages, whose PSRR may be more problematic. But the M2 is not one of them.
 
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Scott, you may be extra-pleased with the First Watt M2x amplifier using the "Norwood" input stage daughter board. It replaces the complementary JFET push-pull first stage, with {an 8-legged AD744 + video speed line driver + lots and lots of local supply bypass}. Since the input stage is positioned before the voltage amplification, lousy PSRR at the IPS gets multiplied by downstream gain. On the other hand, improvements to PSRR at the input stage, get passed along to the output as improvements x gain. And the AD744 has better PSRR than the complementary JFET stage, especially so at 120 Hz and harmonics thereof.
 
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