I recently finished my chipamp.com lm3886 based kit and really like the sound it produces....a wonderful sounding little amp for the money. My issue is the heat produced by the chips - they are getting really freaking hot!
The amp uses all of the standard parts supplied with the kit, except the rail capacitors. I replaced them with Nichicon 2200uf 50v vx series caps. The reason for this was that when I was building the amp a new puppy came along and ran off with my original caps...so I used the Nichicons which I had on hand. Could this be the cause of the heat?
For the most part the amp is normal..I am using a 400va torroid with 2x22v secondaries...and I am getting around 30.6v dc going to each channel. wiring for the power supply is solid copper ribbon wire (4 conductor) and the input/output is silver wire. The PS is the CalrosFM version supplied with the kit. Heatsinks are 1/4 aluminum plate approx 3in tall and 4in wide.
I metered all resistors and checked to make sure that nothing was out of place or had a bad solder joint - but everything seems to be in order.
My test rig consists of a pair of BR1's from Parts Express wired up with some copper cat5 Plenum wire (about 4 ft on each side). The source is an old Philips 926(?) model transport hooked up to an Audio Alchemy DAC. These are run into a passive preamp which uses an Alps 100K pot (Radio Shack version)
Everything seems normal...grounds are good....etc....
Hopefully I have supplied enough info to solicit a little help. I suspect that it might be the caps...but not quite sure. An wanted to ask a for some help before I started tearing the thing down.
Thanks,
Wayne-o
The amp uses all of the standard parts supplied with the kit, except the rail capacitors. I replaced them with Nichicon 2200uf 50v vx series caps. The reason for this was that when I was building the amp a new puppy came along and ran off with my original caps...so I used the Nichicons which I had on hand. Could this be the cause of the heat?
For the most part the amp is normal..I am using a 400va torroid with 2x22v secondaries...and I am getting around 30.6v dc going to each channel. wiring for the power supply is solid copper ribbon wire (4 conductor) and the input/output is silver wire. The PS is the CalrosFM version supplied with the kit. Heatsinks are 1/4 aluminum plate approx 3in tall and 4in wide.
I metered all resistors and checked to make sure that nothing was out of place or had a bad solder joint - but everything seems to be in order.
My test rig consists of a pair of BR1's from Parts Express wired up with some copper cat5 Plenum wire (about 4 ft on each side). The source is an old Philips 926(?) model transport hooked up to an Audio Alchemy DAC. These are run into a passive preamp which uses an Alps 100K pot (Radio Shack version)
Everything seems normal...grounds are good....etc....
Hopefully I have supplied enough info to solicit a little help. I suspect that it might be the caps...but not quite sure. An wanted to ask a for some help before I started tearing the thing down.
Thanks,
Wayne-o