LuDEF

Official Court Jester
Joined 2003
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you can mount pcbs parallel, with mosfets in sandwich between heatsink and pcb, with mosfet pins bent adequately - upwards

for that, best to move LU and fix to heatsink separatelly and connect with short wires to pcb

plenty of pics around ...... several here (post #2 and around) Babelfish M25, SissySIT - general building tips and tricks

take pcbs in hands, you'll see wide traces on bottom side , no cutting of pcb please ...... at least not where copper is
 
I mounted the LU and mosfets on Aluminum Oxide Ceramic Thermal Pads. The LU
needed a few stacked up. Didn't need to cut the pcb.
 

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Odd harmonics were high with LU Vds 2.4 V. Some 10 -15 dB below second harmonic(post #657).
Checking at Vds 2.3 delivers more of triode character. Third harmonic remains 20 dB below second through most of frequency range.
 

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Second most important question

.. in this forum section, after “Will it drive F4?”, seems to be “Is H2 phase negative?”.

Distortion measurement using REW contains phase information and H2 phase is -73°. I’ve put this in perspective using oscilloscope and signal generator. Yellow trace is 1 kHz ‘fundamental’ and blue trace represents 2 kHz ‘harmonic’ shifted exactly -73 degrees, as measured by REW.

We can see that H2 phase is almost perfect negative.
 

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Let’s check the bottom line on this amplifier. Enough checkboxes are ticked.

  • Distortion is low.
  • It has no NFB.
  • Damping factor is greater than 80 for 8Ω load, at any frequency.
  • It has high output power even to the 4Ω load (up to 60W no sweat).
  • It has adjustable distortion profile or H2 ratio to rest of harmonics.
  • H2 phase is negative.
  • Noise is very low.
Oh, and it sounds wonderful. But, that is true for most of amplifiers published in the Pass labs forum section.
All in all, complete Pass.
 
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Joined 2019
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Another function of jumper JP101 on ZM’s contraptions called amplifiers

It was mentioned several times, but not often enough, that on ZM’s amplifiers with input transformer, you can drive transformer directly connecting input to the appropriate jumper pin.

While input JFET buffer is very good, we can get better results driving transformer with proper low output impedance preamplifier (Iron Turtle, Salas DCG3, ACP+, …).

What do we get?
Better frequency response. -3 dB is at 82 kHz in my case.

Lower distortion. With input buffer, distortion was rising toward higher frequency. With direct drive, H2 is at flat level up to 10 kHz, and from that point only slightly rises. But, I don’t care for H2 level past 10 kHz. H3 is 20 – 25 dB below H2 in wide frequency range and closes to H2 level at 10 kHz. But, I don’t care for H3 past 6 kHz frequency. All higher harmonics are at or below noise level.
At 1W, this is very dominant H2, low H3 and nothing else. Well, there is IMD but it is at acceptable levels (0.1 – 0.2 %).

H2 phase is perfect negative through complete frequency range. My rule of thumb is that H2 is good negative if phase is between -120° to -60°. It is better than that. With JFET input buffer, H2 phase is negative only up to 2 – 3 kHz.

My next task is new input buffer that will enable even better results.
 

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