Audio Amplifier Follies

You know what happens when you assume

These last few weeks of development work haven’t been my greatest. Without getting into the details in this post (certainly it will be talked about soon), I decided to shift gears a bit to a different problem plaguing me lately to see if I can give my mind a break from the current troubleshooting and re-approach an older problem with fresh eyes.

I’ve been encountering an unusual amount of noise in the audio chain of the Project Yamhill Front Panel board, and another receiver project that I’ve been working on with the MAX2681 mixer. Both of them were derived from a design taken out of an old notebook, that I assumed worked fine (yeah…). After chasing my tail thinking the problems with excessive noise were in other blocks of the receiver, it dawned on me that I hadn’t really ruled out that the amplifier itself wasn’t a problem. The amp didn’t sound noisy when it was not connected to anything, so I thought that the noise was being introduced elsewhere. I set this problem aside for a bit in order to work on some other stuff, recognizing that it’s often helpful for me to let problems like this play in my subconscious a bit, and not try to think about it too much.

New Prototype NE5532 Headphones AF Amplifier

So when I got to the point where I wanted to pull my non-existent hair out of my head while working on my current projects, I figured it would be good to shift gears back to this AF amp issue, since I will really need to get this nailed down in order to move forward with multiple projects.