Hey all. I'm building a power amp for the first time, and I think I've settled on the LM3886 stereo kit from chipamp.com. I'm planning on not using a volume control because I already have a preamp. I'm using the M3 headphone amp as a preamp <http://www.amb.org/audio/mmm/>. I set up the M3 to have a gain of 9. The M3 has 26V rails, which should produce a peak to peak max output of around 13V. I know that's a little high, but the M3 is sort of a hi-fi class A headphone amp.
Does anyone know what a good ballpark gain figure for my power amp should be? I think it should be around 2, but that seems oddly low.
To give you a better picture, I'm using 8ohm bookshelves that I built. They're Modula MT's, which are supposed to be very efficient. Thanks!
And as an aside, I think what I want to use is a transformer with 18V secondaries, because the advice I've seen floating around seems to be that 25V secondaries are too much. Thanks!
Does anyone know what a good ballpark gain figure for my power amp should be? I think it should be around 2, but that seems oddly low.
To give you a better picture, I'm using 8ohm bookshelves that I built. They're Modula MT's, which are supposed to be very efficient. Thanks!
And as an aside, I think what I want to use is a transformer with 18V secondaries, because the advice I've seen floating around seems to be that 25V secondaries are too much. Thanks!