Category Archives: amplifier

Hybrid Lab Power Supply From Broken Audio Amp

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The lab power supply is an essential part of any respectable electronics workbench. However, the cost of buying a unit that has all the features required can be eye-wateringly high for such a seemingly simple device. [The Post Apocalyptic Inventor] has showed us how to build a quality bench power supply from the guts of an old audio amplifier.

We’ve covered our fair share of DIY power supplies here at Hackaday, and despite this one being a year old, it goes the extra mile for a number of reasons. Firstly, many of the expensive and key components are salvaged from …read more

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A Guide To Audio Amps For Radio Builders

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For hams who build their own radios, mastering the black art of radio frequency electronics is a necessary first step to getting on the air. But if voice transmissions are a goal, some level of mastery of the audio frequency side of the equation is needed as well. If your signal is clipped and distorted, the ham on the other side will have trouble hearing you, and if your receive audio is poor, good luck digging a weak signal out of the weeds.

Hams often give short shrift to the audio in their homebrew transceivers, and [Vasily Ivanenko] wants to …read more

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Vintage Organ Donates Parts for Two New Instruments

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It’s often hard to know what to do with a classic bit of electronics that’s taking up far too much of the living room for its own good. But when the thing in question is an electronic organ from the 1970s, the answer couldn’t be clearer: dissect it for its good parts and create two new instruments with them.

Judging by [Charlie Williams]’ blog posts on his Viscount Project, he’s been at this since at least 2014. The offending organ, from which the project gets its name, is a Viscount Bahia from the 1970s that had seen better days, apparently …read more

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Biasing That Transistor: The Emitter Follower

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We were musing upon the relative paucity of education with respect to the fundamentals of electronic circuitry with discrete semiconductors, so we thought we’d do something about it. So far we’ve taken a look at the basics of transistor biasing through the common emitter amplifier, then introduced a less common configuration, the common base amplifier. There is a third transistor amplifier configuration, as you might expect for a device that has three terminals: the so-called Common Collector amplifier. You might also know this configuration as the Emitter Follower. It’s called a “follower” because it tracks the input voltage, offering …read more

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Biasing That Transistor: The Common Base Amplifier

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We’ve previously remarked upon a generation lucky enough to be well-versed in microcontrollers and computersised electronics through being brought up on the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi but unlucky enough to have missed out on basic electronics such as how to bias a transistor, and to address that gap we’ve taken a look at the basics of transistor biasing.

All the circuits we worked with in the previous article had the transistor’s emitter taken to ground, took their input from the base, and their output from the collector. This configuration, called a Common Emitter amplifier is probably the most common, …read more

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DIY Mini-Amp Goes to Eleven

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On the day mini-amps were invented, electric guitar players the world over rejoiced.  No longer would they be house-bound when jamming out on their favourite guitar. It is a doubly wondrous day indeed when an electric guitar-inclined maker realizes they can make their own.

[Frank Olson Music] took apart an old pair of headphones and salvaged the speakers — perhaps intending to replicate a vintage sound — and set them aside. Relying on the incisive application of an X-Acto knife, [Olson] made swift work cutting some basswood planks into pieces of the amp before gluing them together — sizing it …read more

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The Coolest Electronic Toys You’ll See At NAMM

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Winter NAMM is the world’s largest trade show for musical instrument makers. It is a gear head’s paradise, filled to the brim with guitars, synths, amps, MIDI controllers, an impossibly loud section filled with drums, ukuleles, and all sorts of electronic noisemakers that generate bleeps and bloops. Think of it as CES, only with products people want to buy. We’re reporting no one has yet stuffed Alexa into a guitar pedal, by the way.

As with all trade shows, the newest gear is out, and it’s full of tech that will make your head spin. NAMM is the expression of …read more

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First Light: The Story of the Laser

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Lasers are such a fundamental piece of technology today that we hardly notice them. So cheap that they can be given away as toys and so versatile that they make everything from DVD players to corneal surgery a reality, lasers are one of the building blocks of the modern world. Yet lasers were once the exclusive province of physicists, laboring over expansive and expensive experimental setups that seemed more the stuff of science fiction than workhouse tool of communications and so many other fields. The laser has been wildly successful, and the story of its development is an intriguing tale …read more

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Lock In Amplifiers

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If you have about an hour to kill, you might want to check out [Shahriar’s] video about the Stanford Research SR530 lock in amplifier (see below). If you know what a lock in amplifier is, it is still a pretty interesting video and if you don’t know, then it really is a must see.

Most of the time, you think of an amplifier as just a circuit that makes a small signal bigger in some way — that is, increase the voltage or increase the current. But there are whole classes of amplifiers designed to reject noise and the lock …read more

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A Queen Mystery: The Legend of The Deacy Amp

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It sounds like a scene from a movie. A dark night in London, 1972. A young man walks alone, heading home after a long night of practicing with his band. His heavy Fender bass slung over his back, he’s weary but excited about the future. As he passes a skip (dumpster for the Americans out there), a splash of color catches his attention. Wires – not building power wires, but thinner gauge electronics connection wire. A tinkerer studying for his Electrical Engineering degree, the man had to investigate. What he found would become rock and roll history, and the seed …read more

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