John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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H,
I would look at shielding and a cellphone extender. Gives you a bit more control.
Hi Ed, I had already suggested this in addition to the shielding, we'll see what they say. I'm just aghast that anyone would even have a phone on in a control room, if just for the mental interruption potential...but that is apparently just me.

Yes I have had folks in arenas put their antennas next my gear. I suspect you can do better! 🙂
I hadn't measured the actual field strength of a cell phone itself at that location, it should be at minimum transmit power considering how close the tower is. Still, it was news to those people that a cell phone can induce interference into nearby equipment, I guess the inverse square law is a foreign concept...

Cheers,
Howie
 
Wavebourn, Volt, you are saying tubes and transformers have better RF immunity? Could you explain, elaborate? Just want to learn more.

Yes. Audio transformers are filters actually, thanks to their parasitic capacitances and inductances. Stray inductance and capacitance between windings and grounded interwinding shield forms kind of a filter. Additional RF chokes from input sockets with capacitors to the ground add one more, symmetric.

Input transistors need much lover signal level to rectify RF than tubes. Plus, feedback loops in high open loop gain solid state amplifiers do not work on RF, that magnifies the problem.
 
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Hi Ed, I had already suggested this in addition to the shielding, we'll see what they say. I'm just aghast that anyone would even have a phone on in a control room, if just for the mental interruption potential...but that is apparently just me.


I hadn't measured the actual field strength of a cell phone itself at that location, it should be at minimum transmit power considering how close the tower is. Still, it was news to those people that a cell phone can induce interference into nearby equipment, I guess the inverse square law is a foreign concept...

Cheers,
Howie


For inside use... try the old land line phone system. Can talk-listen without RFI issues. get one (or more than one phone) with memory and record messages etc. Others can forward their mobile number to the land line number temporarily as needed.

-RNM
 
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I saw measured results of JICO stylus in V15 and it had very sharp HF peak at 13Khz , which was results of high effective mass compared to original which had very low eff. mass of 0.19mg and resonant freq. at 35khz. It gave a bright subjective sound quality, which some think is improvement. Shure Micro -Ridge is the most advanced stylus shape.Thin wall berylium cantilever is the lightest ever produced.

I too read those reviews, but given their age I am pretty sure they were not referring to the latest JICO series with either sapphire or ruby cantilevers. I do not have the specs nor test results with the latest JICO sapphire or ruby SAS, but it would be interesting!

The original stylus was indeed fantastic, quite an achievement! I wish they were still available...I am always leery of eBay "lightly used" styli.

Cheers,
Howie
 
Thanks for the explanation, it´s a good starting point. The passive filtering of RF is easy to grasp. The semiconductor effects I need to look deeper into (review the physics). Tubes I know very little about. You are at a huge advantage to understand all of this.
Input transistors need much lover signal level to rectify RF than tubes.

Rectification of RF. Is this what happens when I place a cellphone next to say, a standard gainclone, and I can clearly hear audio ("squarish") tones? My latest attempt at a chip-amp doesn´t do this at all, it is dead silent, no noise from phones, fridge, nothing. Without input filtering. Sounds much better than standard chip-amps.
 
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Inverting mode means the input signal goes through a resistor that being loaded on parasitic capacitances attenuates RF signal.

It is clearly better than my previous attempts (non-inverting). And I didn´t use non-inverting buffers in front of the THS4131: I just used a floating source going directly into the series input resistors. The source doesn´t have opamps or feedback. It´s dacs and common-gate I/V.
 
Jan -- I don't assume you're playing games, so no worries. I'll need to look at something like how the Tian or Middlebrook probes work.

Also remember that if you're feeding the amplifier from the inverting pin, you'd be shorting pin 2 to ground. What you have shown is the non-inverting configuration only.

Bold mine: my point is when you take an inverting config and ground the independent source you end up with exactly the same circuit. The noninv input is already grounded and the source would normally feed into the Rf resistor to the inv pin, that source is now grounded and you get the same circuit with the Rf normally grounded, the source feeding into the noninv input which now gets also grounded. So in the case you break the loop between output and the input to the feedback circuit, both configs become identical.

Jan
 
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