How do Power Supplies work?

[jchanhm]

I'm just getting into DIY, just finished building my first CMOY and being quite satisfied with it (despite not leaving any room for a pot haha). I've decided to take the obvious step up and build the Pimeta next using Tangent's great tutorial.

I took a look at the schematic, and while I don't understand most of it, I noticed that the power supply is very similar in design to the designs of other amps and DIY projects that I have browsed before.

One thing specifically that I'm wondering about is the purpose behind the 'chain' of capacitors in parallel. Could someone explain this to me, so I can get a better understanding of what I'm building?

Or if you know of any sites/threads which go over the basics of why amps and power supplies are built the way they are, that would be well appreciated also.link to schematic pdf

[peranders]

Originally posted by jchanhm
One thing specifically that I'm wondering about is the purpose behind the 'chain' of capacitors in parallel. Could someone explain this to me, so I can get a better understanding of what I'm building?

Connecting these caps in parallel may serve two purposes:

1 Save space

2 You didn't have the right value.

3 Achieve good high frequency properties (if you also use smaller caps like 100 nF, 1 uF or so)

The TL2426 is a voltage divider with some active parts inside with create in an articial way a low impedance voltage divider. It would have worked pretty good if you had taken 1 + 1 ohms but current consumption with have been undesirable high