"The Wire" Ultra-High Performance Headphone Amplifier - PCB's

opc

Member
Joined 2004
Paid Member
Hi Guys,

Quite a few people were asking about single ended performance, so I took some measurements the other day to show people what SE performance was like.

These measurements were taken with the - terminal tied to ground at the input of this amp. It was fed with a single ended source, and measured single ended on the output with a 32 ohms load. Drive level was 250mV.

As you can see in the graphs below, you don't give up too much performance going to SE input, so I would fully endorse using the amplifier in this manner. 2nd and 3rd harmonics are up about 10dB, but you still retain a very low noise floor and excellent drive capability. Overall distortion is still extremely low, and so is the noise floor.
 

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  • Distortion Product Ratio SE 250mV.png
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  • FFT SE 250mV.png
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  • THD+N SE 250mV.png
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  • THD+N SE 500mV.png
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opc

Member
Joined 2004
Paid Member
There were also some questions about FFT plots with a 10k tone, as well as capacitive loads on the output and a THD vs FREQ plot.

I performed several more measurements to capture most of this stuff, and they are all attached below.

The first three plots are all FFTs (balanced input):

1. 10k FFT at 1V into a 32 ohms load
2. 1k FFT at 2V with a 50 ohm load and a 220pF capacitor in parallel.
3. 10k FFT at 325mV with a 50 ohm load and a 220pF capacitor in parallel.

As you can see, there are no HF distortion issues, and even at 10kHz distortion is extremely low. The amplifier is also more or less unaffected by capacitive loads, and I even did a run with a purely capacitive load (only the 220pF) and there were no issues.

Next up we have distortion vs. frequency measurements. These are sweeps from 20Hz to 20kHz with no HF or LF filters in place. I performed these measurements with a variety of different loads and drive levels:

1. 32 ohm, 2VRMS
2. 50 ohm // 220pF, 2VRMS
3. 50 ohm // 220pF, 1VRMS

Hopefully this is enough to cover all the bases. I won't be doing anymore measurements on this, as the graphs presented should be more than enough to give you a good idea of performance, and there's far more information here than you would ever get with a commercial product.

Cheers,
Owen
 

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  • FFT 50 ohm - 220pF 2V.png
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  • FFT 10k 1V.png
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  • THD - 32R 2VRMS.png
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  • THD v FREQ 50 ohm - 220pF 2V.png
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  • THD v FREQ 50 ohm - 220pF 1V.png
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opc

Member
Joined 2004
Paid Member
Hi Guys,

I've attached an updated list of those interested after the last few posts.

Looks like there are 31 boards spoken for, and 20 kits. At this point, it's looking like I'm going to drop the kit option all together and just sell the boards by themselves. For the kit to be worthwhile, I needed more or less everyone on board, and that's not the way it turned out.

Dropping the kit would also allow me to start accepting payments immediately, and I could start shipping boards next week. If I were to do the kit, it could be weeks before anything is ready to ship, and I don't want people to lose interest and drop out.

On that note, if you want boards and your name is on the list, feel free to make payment to owen dot columbus at my gmail account. The total is $20 which includes shipping to anywhere.

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR ADDRESS IS INCLUDED AND CORRECT IN THE PAYPAL PAYMENT! I will only be looking at the info in the payment when it comes time to ship, so please don't include the wrong address and then send emails with different addresses. I've had this problem in the past, and it was a serious headache. I will only ship to the address included with the payment, no exceptions.

Maybe once everyone has boards, there will be more interest in setting up a GB kit for parts.

Cheers,
Owen
 

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  • People interested in The Wire.pdf
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i agree. that would be cool if the opamps could be grouped bought somehow. one could save a lot of money on these and are required for every build (i guess most dont already have them?). and if it could ship with the boards it might be best of both worlds, except for owen who would have to organize something for us again :(.
 
yes I understand why owen is doing this, the amount of people wanting just bards is quite high and some want just the amp board etc a total PITA. i'm making a digikey order right now for my parts, should I hang on and cover the opamps? i'll start a wiki to see what the numbers are if everyone agrees thats a good idea?
 
there arent any kits offered only boards, if you read the last couple of pages. I may help out with ordering the opamps and doing a GB there, but you will need to sort out the rest of the BOM yourself

I was thinking of offering the same thing last night, it might make more sense for me to do it, being located in North America, to keep the postage costs down. (thinking of having them delivered to a UPS drop just across the border in the US, so I wouldn't have to pay the CDN taxes on everything, and then doing a quick mailout from there)
 
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there arent any kits offered only boards, if you read the last couple of pages. I may help out with ordering the opamps and doing a GB there, but you will need to sort out the rest of the BOM yourself

I understood that maybe there wouldn't be kits available if the total amount (25) was not reached. That's 2 more right there, which means still 3 to go, which may be feasible.
But maybe I understood wrong (I'm french).
Anyway, if anyone would offer kits, I would be more than interested!
 
For 50pcs of LME49600 you've got:

Newark = 6.98 each
Digikey = 9.47 each
Arrow = 6.53 each
Future = 6.90 each

Digikey's single part price is $11.56.
I might be interested in 4 LME49600 if you could be so kind and the price worked out right.

Digikey have taken about $1 off the price according to when I looked yesterday evening.

I'm in the UK. If the total price of four is more than £18 (about $26) there is 20% VAT and £10 (about $15.50) import duty for me to pay. This would make the price for four near enough to the UK price to not be worth the effort. Or indeed over the UK price. Do you to declare a price on the envelope? If so could you declare it at just under the threshold?

Currently the single price of these in the UK is about £11.40 or about $17.80.

Thanks,

Ian