Diamante -a discrete medium power opamp

Hey all
well the boards arrived they are fine, eventually used the pdf s not the gerbers, the board house said that it would be a lot more expensive with gerbers. right now i paid 450 INR for two boards. i think thats a little more than $10.
will post pictures later am in a bit of a rush now.
populated the boards last night, and tested it out...i had some wierd problems where the offset kept rising slowly and didnt settle. and when i played music it went wild and kept changing randomly...i desoldered the trimpots and set roffset to 5k and rbias to 1k and soldered them back on. it was fine....dont know what was wrong earlier...
with rbias at around 1k the voltage across r1-r6 is around 20mv....is that okay? i havent moved it much from there yet, it is set around 25mv will listen to it like this for a while before increasing the bias....
i just wanted one clarification....
i have populated all the postions on the board including the optional caps. is the gain of the amp in this configuration 6db? while testing it did not seem as though there was any voltage gain... how high can i take the gain without overly loading the output stage?
thanks, and will post pictures of both the boards and of the completed project soon....
cheers,
mymindinside
 
Very likely you did not have the offset trimpot centered. You should be able to adjust the offset to zero.

20mv - 25mv bias is enough.

You should adjust the gain until it seems sufficient to you, if you get the amp clipping you know the gain is too high. How much gain you need to depends on your source. Also if you don't have the bias /offset correct the amp may be quiet for other reasons.

You don't need to remove RBIAS to test the resistance accross it. You can simply use your multimeter at the ends of the pot because the wiper is tied to one end.

Try getting output offset to zero.

Cheers!
Russ
 
Just a question of curiosity, could you replace the output stage with a single pair of BD139/140 without much loss? I am just curious as I am looking at this circuit for headphone amp use and wondered if the TO-126 device would be better especially if used at a fairly high bias.
 
jaycee said:
Just a question of curiosity, could you replace the output stage with a single pair of BD139/140 without much loss? I am just curious as I am looking at this circuit for headphone amp use and wondered if the TO-126 device would be better especially if used at a fairly high bias.


It should work just fine. You may want to increase R16 and R17 (say to 10ohms) if you don't seem to be getting enough bias through the output devices. But I would try the indicated values first.

Cheers!
Russ
 
Russ White said:
I will gladly post gerbers for individual use only. I am not at home right now. When I return later today I will post them.

Cheers!
Russ

I have a sort of off-topic question for you, Russ. What software do you use to design and simulate this stuff? I'm new to most of this, but I'm following along fairly well. I think getting into some related software just might help with my understanding of things.

Thanks!
Scott
 
Hi
Well i finished the amp, and it now lives in a nice wooden case..
im using a 10k pot at the input...
the problem however is, that the dc offset changes when i change the position of the volume knob....
this is a big problem., as the offset goes quite high. and when the pot is turned to the fullest extent,i.e. loudest volume, the offset goes wild and goes into 100+ mv on the positive adn negative side, it keeps going like this and does not settle. if i reduce the volume to 70%, the offset goes down to 5 mv or so,.. the problem is clearly audible in only one channel, the right one, and i hear distortion....its mostly noticeable in the low bass....and i can hear it only on the bass notes...
Can i solve the problem by putting a DC blocking cap at the input...im not sure if this would solve the problem. if it would help what would be the best place to put it? before or after the input resistor. Rin. also to calculate the corner freq would one use the value of Rz?

Thanks guys.
mymindinside
 
Is there DC from your source?

I am thinking the there is some issue with Roffset (pot).

What happens when you remove it?

The offset should not be very high even with no pot there.

If you want to use a DC blocking cap at the input just use Rz to calculate the corner frequency. With 47K Rz , 10uf or so should work great. Even 4.7uf would be fine.

Cheers!
Russ