While browsing through the audio/diy forums and websites, I am constantly amazed by the depth of know-how in the hi-fi community, however, when it comes to the physical construction, I am equally amazed by the general poor showing – many of the amplifiers are down right hideous, even if they sound great, I would never … Continue reading
It is a bit frustrating when the tools do not do what they are suppose to do… In an earlier post, I mentioned that TINA-TI could not even perform a transient analysis on a simple amplifier, well it happened again when I tried to run some simulations of the Baby Huey design found at diyaudio. … Continue reading
While searching for other ways to generate THD/IMD vs output power plots, I came across some application notes from Spectrum Software, the maker of Micro-Cap, an expensive simulation package used by the pros. Luckily there is a student/trial version available for download so I can test its features. With the program, it is very easy … Continue reading
While reading Dmitry Nizh’s great site, I found an article on parameter optimization using SPICE. In Dmitry’s case, he used an AWK script to pipe the output of the distortion analysis from SPICE to a plotting program, so the harmonics vs. power curves could be displayed and further analysed. To see what else can be … Continue reading
Why is something so simple, so difficult to do?! I thought I found the perfect simulator for my needs – TINA by DesignSoft, alas, it failed in one important area – convergence! Even with a relatively simple 3-stage tube amp circuit, it would not converge, while SIMetrix and WinSPICE had no problem with it. Ok, … Continue reading
Time to clean house! I really got sick of looking at all the bare guitar amp chassis that I built over the past few years – they are ugly! And knowing what I know now, I think I can do a better job building them, as well as making some improvements to the designs. So … Continue reading
