Ready to build!

[hawkfeather]

Well, I've studied long and hard and gathered top notch parts. Anyone venture to suggest a fairly simple yet high quality/great sounding design for a first time project. I will make the PCB myself so it doesn't need to be a design with a ready-made one. The AmpsLab designs look fairly simple, but boast excellent specs. I would like to use SOT223 units in the first stage, and yes, I can solder them quite well. The only parts that I cut corners on are the PSU electrolytics. I have eight United Chemicon, 10000uF, 80V units I got from their surplus site for 4 bucks each.

[CBS240]

Hi Hawkfeather,

Is this your first amp circuit or have you built any other electronics before? It might be in your best interest to start 'small' if you know what I mean. Once you can develop a method to construction, bigger(and much more expensive) will be easier and cheaper to make, especially if you start from scratch.(which is much more satisfying personally ) This is a circuit I made just to use some parts I had lying around and wast some time, but it works and sounds absolutly wonderful. I take it on the road with me for use in hotel rooms and such as I work away from home most of the time. It can drive 4Ohms to about 25Wrms. Quite reliable as I have had no problems from it at all. DC offset is never more than like 2mV one way or the other, very stable, and very little noise. When I first made it, I had it on a very small heat sink so it would get very hot and I could test stability...bias...perfect. Never smoked a single part. Such a general circuit could be made like this with almost any parts, just breadboard it first. Vregs could be IC's or whatever. Just if you use a pot for the emitter resistors in the diff, be sure not to cheap it out and use a good quality one, mine is 20 turn, gives very acurate DC bias.

I used mostly SMD parts here but I suppose it doesn't really matter. Just saves lots of space I used pre-made PCB's from Radio Shack and used solder to bridge the traces between components. Sort of cheap and not so beautiful, but works great and is simple.

(2 of 4 channels complete )

[CBS240]

All these parts can be found on http://www.datasheetarchive.com to compare with what you may have at hand.