Friday, October 25, 2013

Oscilloscope

Having a multimeter is not enough to build an amplifier. I need an oscilloscope.
Thanks to craigslist, I found a new challenge.
Tektronix-TDS544A. Cool 500MHz digital scope with 4 inputs. But there are some caveats...
Before buying I tried to google it and found that all these scopes have leaking SMD capacitors. Leakage leads to a number of different anomalies.
Seller of mine scope told me the scope powers up but he can't see a thing. Since it is all crap shooting I gave it a try.
As expected, a lot of capacitors have leaks.
The plan is:
1. remove them all
2. clean all the PCBs
3. clean again
4. clean one more time
5. solder new capacitors

Some leaks look very suspicious
The worst leak


let's clean it up

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Class D?

Among all the passionate discussions taking place on audiophile sites I found that I need to find a sweet point between the money, effort I put in my project, the fun I can get working on it and result (in terms of sound quality) I can get at the end.
Since I'm just an ignorant hobbyist I don't see a point to invest too much in my first project. I want it to be both fun and challenging.

So my amp is going to be fully digital class D amp. No analog circuits at all.

The roadmap is:
1. Play music on a device which has a USB
2. Convert USB to I2S
3. Pass I2S to PWM modulator
4. Feed power stage with PWM from the modulator.
Seems not to be super extremely complex.

I found these nice chips from Texas Instruments:
-  PWM modulator TAS5548
- 300W/channel power stageTAS5631B
last one promises pretty good THD up to 100W, but I don't think I ever need that power, especially having active amplification.
TAS5548 can processes 8 separate channels (4 I2S stereo channels) at 96kHz, has two ASRCs onboard and 7 biquads per channel. So it is able to handle all active crossover filters! I like the idea.

So next step is to design a PCB.