rjm

Considering the light "work" they are required to do, headphone amplifier design is a surprisingly tough nut to crack.

The sobering fact is that the built-in headphone jack on most modern consumer electronics provides pretty decent performance. Taking that output and routing it through an external headphone amplifier rarely improves things, and frequently has a negative impact owing to increased background noise.*

[* This is a simple consequence of adding a volume control which attenuates the signal, and a gain stage which amplifies it back up. Even if the gain stage has the same noise floor as the input signal, the S/N is reduced by the amount of attenuation.]

There are specific use cases, particularly with "outlier" headphone models that require unusually high voltages or currents to drive, but in the main, for generic 16 ohm IEHs and the generic headphone ICs used in consumer electronics, external headphone amplifiers...

Lots of circuits out there, but most are variations of a small set of archetypes. Let's see if I can put together a list:

1. Dedicated headphone amplifier IC. e.g.(lme49860)

2. Battery powered, single stage, generic audio op amp. The ever-popular mint tin cmoy.

3. Op amp + buffer, which is usually one of,
a. complementary transistor pair (diamond buffer, etc)
b. a buffer or (multiple) op amp ICs
the most well known proponent of this "compound amplifier" configuration being Walt Jung

The buffer is almost always placed inside the feedback loop. Exceptions include the nwavguy o2 and my sapphire amp.

4. simple 2 or 3 transistor "introduction to electronics"-style amplifier

5. The "little big amp", a scaled back version of a transistor or vacuum tube power amplifier design. (Zen, DoZ, transformer coupled SET amps)

6. The power follower....

Thinking I should get a new soldering station.

I've had my eye on a Weller station for the longest time, but put off getting one for one reason or another.

Looking at the selection, I think the choice comes down to the two following models, or, indeed the equivalent made by another company:

WTCPT (link)

WES51 (link)

The main difference is in the WTCPT the tip temperature is fixed, but rigorously controlled, while the WES51 has user adjustable power but the tip temperature is left unregulated.

I'm leaning towards the WES51 as being slightly more in line with my own style of work: I'm more likely to want higher or lower temperatures depending on the job at hand than I am to require "700F" exactly.

Update 1.

A little concerned the WES51 is only 50W max. That's less than the maximum I use now for the tough stuff.

Hakko has two models in the price...

Under windows at least, Audacity is unable to record audio at bitrates above 16 bit.

It will seem to, all right, but the data is quantized at 16 bit (30 microvolt LSB), regardless of the settings chosen.

The attached images show the same source, the first recording is made in Audacity, supposedly 24 bit, but actually only 16 bit, while the second is recorded with a program than actually supports 24 bit, exported, and imported into Audacity. The data is amplified +70dB in both cases to make the difference visible.

Audacity will happily manipulate and save high bit rate data, but as a result of licensing restrictions and on account of it being freeware, it does not support the actual recording of this data.

***

Any internet search will confirm that the Windows version of Audacity is limited to 16 bit recording. And yes, it's more of a limitation of Windows than it is of Audacity. My irritation, however, is chiefly with Audacity...

Two headphone amplifiers sharing the same basic MOSFET source follower output stage.

When the source current and source resistance are optimized for the given headphone load and similar maximum output power (~50 mW at 1% THD), the distortion pattern vs. output power is remarkably similar.

One plot below is simulation, the other measurements. The J-Mo 2 simulation closely matched the actual measurements, it wasn't worth my while to generate a full simulated data set when I already had the measurements on hand. No reason to suspect that the Szekeres sim is inaccurate, either.

The take home message is the distortion characteristic of a MOSFET follower is what it is, and unavoidable. Take it or leave it, as it were. However - and this is key - if you don't optimize the stage for the headphone impedance, the distortion for a given output power will increase significantly.

As an aside: Greg did his homework with the original circuit....