Marsh headphone amp from Linear Audio

[jackinnj]

From Volume 3 of "Linear Audio". It sims out very well. Here's a possible PCB 3D image:

[homemodder]

Hmmm, this is just a combination of two well known circuits, both of which I have showed here on this forum. The input is the buffer as shown by JLH, the second part is as I described in Mpp thread to tweak JLHs headphone amp. Does this designer frequent DIY audio ??

Anyway it will sound and measure very well indeed.

[jackinnj]

Richard Marsh has been writing "do-it-yourself" audio articles since before Compuserve! The genesis for this particular article was some work he had published in "The Audio Amateur" 3/80 with credit to R. Baker from MIT.

[homemodder]

I have no idea who these people are. The person who he should be crediting is JLH who developed these type circuits back in the late 60s.
I didnt expect people to admit or reveal exactly where their ideas came from anyway.
I have a headphone amp which is 95 % this exact design with the tiny difference that the input stage is further bootstrapped to lessen the load of the output, just lowering distortion further.
Its a excellent headphone amp either way, well worth building.

[jackinnj]

Baker was the inventor of the "Diamond Buffer" and "Baker Clamp". I believe that he has over 80 patents, dating from the early 1960's.

I still have Dick Marsh's article "Picking Capacitors" from Audio Magazine in 1980. This was co-authored with Walt Jung and is archived on http://waltjung.org/PDFs/Picking_Capacitors_1.pdf Dick wrote one of the first TAA articles on passive RIAA equalization.

At any rate, I am going to have some boards burned and offer them at cost -- just as I did for SY's "Impasse" and "His Master's Noise".

[johnferrier]

from the Linear Audio site . . .

"If you are looking for that ultimate headphone replay amplifier, you couldn’t do any better than with this discrete circuit. Richard Marsh develops his circuits from the well-known diamond topology but with a twist. His headphone amp is a very clean and linear discrete design that’s equally at home driving low-impedance or high impedance ‘phones. But Richard doesn’t stop there; he realizes that many headphones do not produce flat frequency response at your ears. Therefore, he borrows from ‘room equalization’ technology and develops a simple way to use that to equalize the headphone response at your ears.'


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[johnferrier]

"Richard Marsh grew up with music in the home - piano, singing and records playing. He builds his first tube preamp and power amp at age 16. Richard was drafted out of college to work in High Energy Physics R&D at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There he held the rare 'Q' clearance (above top secret) for 23 years. In this position, he developed a talent and expertise in precision test and measurements. Eventually, he became responsible for coordinating development of several high profile DOE and DOD projects, including experimental test accelerators, fusion energy systems, and nuclear engineering systems programs (nuclear weapons). During that time he also continued to write articles and develop circuits and systems for audio. He is a member of IEEE and AES and holds many patents.

After retiring from government R&D, he pursued his musical and audio interests as a consultant to consumer electronics companies in USA and Asia. He has now started learning to play blues bass guitar. Richard also spends time every year in S.E. Asia helping poor children in Nepal get an education thru direct support."


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[Telstar]

Interesting

[jackinnj]

John: his picture certainly looks like "Sheridan Whiteside" (played by Monty Wooley in "The Man Who Came to Dinner".)

[neb001]

Looking forward to the pcb's, the article in linear audio certainly caught my interest