I've never put everything into a single LTSpice worksheet like this before: I find it fascinating. You can really pull apart a circuit to see what makes it tick, before solder ever hits the iron.

Power supply ripple, frequency response, gain, and crosstalk can be established. You can look at turn on and turn off transients, inrush currents, and conductance angle, and check peak currents in the filter capacitors. It's all there if you care to peek in and poke around.

I'm such a huge fan of LTSpice...

The only problem, really, is it is too perfect: all devices are perfectly matched, every part value is exact, and the temperature is always 25 C. Ground loops, wiring inductance, and thermal runaway do not exist. So no, of course there are no guarantees - but as a tool to get you 90% of the way there with the minimum of fuss and bother it is truly indispensable.

Actually I find the more experience you have the more useful LTSpice...

There are various tricks, like parallel input devices and active current sources, that I have avoided here in the interests of simplicity. If you want to go down that road, you can get an idea where it leads, here. Instead, the circuit below is basically a JFET version of my old 6DJ8 amp, here. A single JFET was getting me nowhere in terms of output impedance - around 10kohms! - so I moved to a compound stage buffering each amplifier with a source follower.

Noise and distortion figures look okay. The gain is only 30 dB. A bit low. The main trick is the PSRR, which is awful. The two stage circuit actually amplifies the power supply noise onto the output. So considerable effort must be put into the power supply regulation and filtering. I note that this is pretty much par for the course with this circuit topology where resistors are used instead of current sources on the JFET drains.

The circuit below leaves out the usual RC filter inserted between the power supply...

This Excel (2013) worksheet will help you fine tune the values of the resistors and capacitors used in the passive RIAA network found in any number of two stage tube, op amp, and FET phono stage circuits.

Excel handles complex numbers well enough now that this job isn't particularly difficult, though for simplicity the DC blocking cap (Cc) is left out of the calculation.

There are lots of phono stage circuits floating around based on two jFET amplifier stages and a passive RIAA network. I'm not sure who did what first, but there's the Boozehound, LePacific, and of course Salas versions.

Setting aside concerns about the ripple rejection**, today I'd just like to focus on the distortion and noise of the circuit itself. The passive RIAA stage is a large obstacle. It attenuates the signal substantially at all but treble frequencies, and it generally presents a large series impedance - both of which tends to increase circuit noise.

The jFET themselves meanwhile are a fine balance between low current, low noise operation with high distortion, or running at high current, high noise, with low distortion. Circuit gain must be paid for meanwhile with added distortion since the two stage design struggles to manage 40 dB.

After spending some time in LTSpice with this, I realized it was the proverbial rock and hard place...

The discussion thread at the headphone forum is here, but I wanted to throw out the problem to the general blog-reading community here at diyaudio to see if anyone can nail this.

The earthed chassis (light blue) must connect to the circuit common i.e. "ground" (pale green). I do not know where the best place on the circuit ground is to tie that connection.

Suggestions please!

(COM and GND are completely equivalent pads on the circuit board, while IN- and OUT- also pads on the board but physically further away on the ground plane.)

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Answer: as long as it connects at one point only, or the same point of both channels, it doesn't seem to matter at all. I have it connected at the ground tab of the headphone jack and that seems to be as good as anywhere.

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The noise was in fact magnetic interference emanating from the transformers. Grounding layout changes / electrostatic...

Work stuff. I was writing Labview vis for an hp 4192A LF impedance analyzer and needed something to measure to check the data acquisition program. So I stuck some of my audio capacitors I happened to have into the 16047A test fixture "just to see".

I have no idea what these measurements are telling me other than yes, the 0.47 uF capacitors are indeed 0.47 uF ... up to about 0.5 MHz anyway. Maybe someone can do some technical analysis. I was struck though by just how quickly the inductance of these big film caps kicks in. As audio coupling caps they are fine, but if you are silly enough to use them as power supply bypass for example...

There are some reproducibility issues I'm still coming to grips with, but the differences shown in the plots is definitely from the capacitors themselves and not the leads or random variations. I've measured them several times over with similiar result.

LTSpice copy (protection diodes removed) of the original JE-990 circuit. Even with BC327/337 subbed in for all the original transistors the simulation works without further modification.

C1 seems to be critical for stability. C2 and C3 damp overshoot seen on the simulated square wave response, hinted at by the high frequency rise in frequency response shown in the screen grab below.

My impression is that this circuit is of the heavily optimized, no-stone-left-untouched variety.

Sourced from m.nats page and The John Hardy Company.

This post, about a push-pull MOSFET output stage for a headphone amp, got me thinking again about the Audio Technica AT-HA5000, which is something of a benchmark in its class. The "basic" signal circuit (not a complete schematic, it's clearly missing some ancillary details) is attached below. Probably out of MJ originally.

I think with any circuit like this, the differences are less about the MOSFETs and the operating points and more about the front end and what tricks you do with the power supply. That, and how you make sure it doesn't go up in a puff of vaporized silicon taking your headphones with it.

The Audio Technica schematic has nice old-school Zener regulators, a discrete JFET front end, a long tailed pair + current mirror for voltage gain and "proper" BJT Vbe multiplier and driver stage. Q7 is presumably in thermal contact with Q10,11 providing overtemp protection, and the output has a protection relay (not shown in detail) for...

The circuit was originally hosted on Headwize, but the site seems to have gone offline.

It was a single stage resistively-loaded MOSFET follower, a unity gain current buffer used to drive headphones.

Some updated versions provided below. As noted in the comments the "Reverso" version with the CCS on the V+ and a p-channel mosfet has better PSRR performance, especially with voltage divider network R6,R7,C4 on the collector of Q2.

So good in fact that I switched around the n-channel version to use a negative voltage rail to obtain the same result!

I was perusing this thread earlier today. Which led me to what I think is the original source, at least as a modern, relatively clean headphone amp version of the original original (by way of ESP).

Some comments from our own Nelson Pass are seemingly relevant.

AC coupled, and simplified to a single supply voltage, the circuit can be run at +5 V operation (USB, etc) with fairly decent performance.

The circuit is optimized for 16 ohm headphones.