John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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Ooops, I was posting on another thread and got numbers mixed up, sorry about that. I meant this Jaycar lead free solder 97.3% Tin/0.7% Copper. I find this stuff to solder very nicely and sound good and subjectively much prefer it to Lead containing solders.

Cheers.
The least different the joining metals are, the better. And, the fewer different metals used., will be better.

THx-RNMarsh
 
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Hi Scott,
I skimmed the link you provided, it was interesting for one claim that I find improbable I'll quote that passage ...
A few words about Joe Rasmussen: If you ever heard the Allen Wright Electronics valve amps of about 2 decades ago and more, (AJ Van Del Hul described his AWE Realtime power amps as the most realistic amps on earth), Joe Rasmussen was responsible for many of Allen Wright's electronic designs.
You have got to be kidding me! Someone is giving Joe credit for Allen Wright's work!

I had met Arthur Salvatore when he lived in Toronto. I don't know where he is now. He's an interesting fellow with viewpoints that are uniquely his own. When I met him, his listening room was surrounded by LPs on three walls (that is a huge amount of lacquer!) with power cords snaking to a small collection of tube amps and preamp topped with a turntable. The two odd speakers in the room topped off this visual treat. I can't remember what equipment was there as I had other things to do. I believe he owned the building where he was living and working and sold equipment by appointment. Reading his advice in the link, I can believe this is the same person. He was friendly and engaging at the time.

-Chris
 
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A while back i was wondering about the distotion of measurement microphones adequacy for measuring low distortion speakers.

Seems there are quit a few "condenser" type microphones -- electrics et al... that are low enough distortion but only down to 100Hz

The distortion of these microphones rises a LOT below 100hz. An AES paper explains why and how much and what to do about it.

100 Meg Ohm of input Z of older tube mic amps is not sufficient. 3G is minimum for lowst electrical distortions. 20G Ohm is recomended in which case thd will be below .003% THD for 1/2 inch capsule used compared to 10%.

AES JUne 2000. Vol 48 No6 "Condenser microphone electrical distortions"

THx-RNMarsh
 
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Hi Richard,
I wish I had access to those papers.

Those impedance's you're talking about can only be met with Teflon standoffs and dry air dielectric from what I know. Sealed in nitrogen would be my guess as to how to do this. Normal PCB materials are far too leaky, so Teflon or glass substrate?

-Chris
 
A while back i was wondering about the distotion of measurement microphones adequacy for measuring low distortion speakers.

Seems there are quit a few "condenser" type microphones -- electrics et al... that are low enough distortion but only down to 100Hz

The distortion of these microphones rises a LOT below 100hz. An AES paper explains why and how much and what to do about it.

100 Meg Ohm of input Z of older tube mic amps is not sufficient. 3G is minimum for lowst electrical distortions. 20G Ohm is recomended in which case thd will be below .003% THD for 1/2 inch capsule used compared to 10%.

AES JUne 2000. Vol 48 No6 "Condenser microphone electrical distortions"

THx-RNMarsh
Yes, high input Z is paramount for low LF distortion. Basically it's a C-R-highpass with a nonlinear C (plus the much larger DC-blocking cap), therefore the corner frequency of this must be as low as possible. Low distortion is best achieved with lowest excursion of the diaphragm which favors small size capsules (at the cost of noise) which have lower capacitance and therefore need even higher load resistance for a low LF corner. Parallel external capacitance helps to reduce the impedance but introduces its own systematic wideband distortion, so of little help here.

Source : B&K Microphone Handbook Volume 1, https://www.bksv.com/media/doc/be1447.pdf

Construction-wise, bootstrapping and guarding are used in many capsule buffers to get to the required impedance levels. The classic B&K buffer uses the leakage current of two back-to-back bootstrapped JFET diodes for buffer FET biasing, for example. Still there is a only a single digit Gigaohms feed resistor for the polarisation voltage which isn't bootstrapped in the clone B&K buffer amp I own and thus this may dominate distortion. Bootstrapping can be managed on the supply side of the cable, though (haven't tried this yet)
 
indra1 said:
The fact remains that there is still a very strong but only partially correct view that best fidelity needs the lowest distortion present as signal at the output of the power amplifier. And most designers are ignorant, dismissive, uninterested or find themselves helpless about distortion generated from that point on.
Best fidelity requires sufficiently low distortion at the amp output; people still argue about how low is sufficiently low. Amp designers may indeed be helpless about what the speakers do, but I doubt if they are ignorant, dismissive or uninterested.
 
Yes it is brain that deciphers direct and reflected sound.

Yes but just in case there is any confusion - the brains does it's analysis based on the interaural time & volume differences (along with spectral correlation) to be able to extract what is direct Vs what is reflected sound. The pressure waves that hit a microphone's diaphragm is exactly the same as the pressure waves that hits one ear's tympanic membrane.
 
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