LM3886 Distortion Sources

[scott_jcp]

My gainclone experience has hit a turn for the worst recently.
I destroyed one channel of my amp by shorting the pins of the chip to metal plate that was holding it to the heat sink. Oh well, you live and learn I suppose. I am going to order some replacement parts and repair it.

At first I figured I would just use the amp in mono for now, but having plugged it in, I realized that I probably shouldn't use it at all until I resolve some distortion issues I'd been having. (They haven't appeared after my destruction of the other channel, they've always been there) For some reason, I get significant levels of distortion (not clearly audible to my friends), but definitely pronounced enough for me to detect it, and seems to have caused one of my tweeters to start popping. I don't want to scrap this amp, rather I would like to fix it. What are the various sources of distortion I should check for?

[ROVSING]

If the distortion is constant it might be your rectifier diodes, another member of this forum had the same problem first he thought that it was because his toroid were to close to the PCB's but it turned out that it was his MUR860's he changed them and the noise has gone away.
You could try to measure the DC outputs on the rectifier board in a minut to see if the voltage is stabil.