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Cordellicious results

So, the low distortion oscillator is all put together.

Oscillator innards.

And it works very nicely.

Oscillator working, whee

When the oscillator output is connected straight to the analyser input, it reads around the analyser’s specified floor (0.0021%) between 20Hz and 20kHz. The above picture shows 0.0017% at 1kHz with the 80kHz low pass filter engaged.

I took it home and used it to test my new Selfless Amp against the old Ice Block. The “Selfless” was somewhat degraded from its earlier bench test results because of hum induced by the transformer, but it still managed around 0.002% at 1kHz and 0.008% at 20kHz. (Both about 70W into 8 ohms: the readings at lower powers were inflated by the hum, and noise from the preamp.) The Ice Block couldn’t match this with 0.005% at 1kHz and 0.015% at 20kHz. In fact, one of the channels had 0.3% and whacking the amp made it jump around frantically. (The distortion reading, not the amp itself! :p) Turned out the speaker relay was bad, which gives me an idea for another project…

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Cordell oscillator success

Well, the Cordell low distortion oscillator worked a treat! It didn’t work right away: I left a connection out of the PCB. And then I didn’t have a TL074 chip, so I tried a LMC660, and the chip blew up for some reason, which had me puzzled.

(I just checked the LMC660 datasheet: It’s specified for 15V total supply voltage. I fed it +/-16, a total of 32V. Whoops.)

Then, Cordell’s schematic calls for a 2N4091 JFET, a device with a high Idss and low on-resistance, but I couldn’t find any of those. I tried a BF245C, but it wasn’t strong enough. The AGC loop just whacked the gate as far positive as it could go, trying to turn the JFET “more than full on”. So I kept adding more of the things in parallel, until I saw the AGC go negative by a volt or two. I ended up with 5 of them, bodged onto a piece of stripboard.

A J111 would probably have been a better choice. These are the ones Douglas Self recommends as analog switches in “Self On Audio”, and they have a similar 30 ohm Rds(on). JFETs are so variable, though, you never know what you’ll get.

Frequency control with the “Blue Velvet” pot works great! There’s no noticeable amplitude bounce. Well, except for the fact that it’s backwards: anticlockwise to increase. I couldn’t see any easy way to dismantle the pot and reverse the action.

And, first time on the distortion analyser: 0.0015% at 1kHz! 🙂 That’s better than the analyser’s own spec.

Stay tuned as we post some pics and stuff the thing into the spare bay of the DA4084.

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A “Cordell” low distortion oscillator

Recently, I accidentally broke my low-distortion oscillator, the “Williams Memorial”. The breadboard was such a mess, that I decided it would be almost as easy to just build the Bob Cordell design.

I altered the design a bit: I replaced the switched attenuator for a plain volume pot, made the output balanced, and swapped the three LM318 op-amps for a single TL074.

I put a rectifier, smoothing capacitors and regulators on board. I’m hoping that my THD analyser mainframe will have a couple of spare transformer windings to power it, and the whole thing can fit in the empty left-hand bay where the SG505 would have gone, if I ever had managed to find one.

For the frequency control, I plan to try a 50k Alps “Blue Velvet” pot. I’m hoping the superior tracking and wiper resistance, combined with Cordell’s non-linear amplitude control scheme, and the integrating nature of the state-variable oscillator, will make it usable. I’m also hoping it can be taken apart and reassembled with the shaft coming out of the other end, to make it reverse log.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll use a binary set of switches, or something. That worked surprisingly well on the Williams Memorial. Eventually I’d like to try with 4066-type analog switches in current mode.

Anyway, here’s the schematic and a preview of the board.

Low distortion oscillator schematic

Image of low distortion oscillator PCB

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Power up, distortion down

I did some more work on my Blameless amp project. First of all, I built another output stage, so I now have two output stages, but still only one driver board. Then, I improved my distortion measuring setup a bit. I shielded all the cables and rejigged the grounding, which reduced the oscillator + analyser floor to 0.0036%, with the 80kHz filter engaged.

With this extra resolution I was able to do some more tweaking of the Blameless. I found the following issues:

The MJE350 transistor in the output stage pre-driver is much slower than its MJE340 “complement”. I replaced it with a MJE15033. This allowed me to reduce the anti-sproggie resistor on the base. I was running 100 ohms on the NPN side and 200 on the PNP side, so I changed both to 150 and retried the reactive load test. There were no parasitics, and hopefully I’ll get a bit more power before clipping now.

I was only running about half of the amount of feedback that Douglas Self used in his experiments. (I used the same input stage gm and compensation capacitor as he did, giving the same open-loop gain at 20kHz, but I designed for twice the closed loop gain.) To fix this, I reduced the input pair’s emitter resistors from 100 ohms to 51.

The input doesn’t like being driven straight off the wiper of a 20k volume pot: when I buffered it with a NE5532 op-amp, the noise and distortion went down. I think Douglas Self implicitly designed all his circuits to run best with a 50 ohm source impedance, because that’s what an Audio Precision test set has. 🙂 He runs the input transistors at 2mA for high slew rate and lots of gm, but the downside is lots of noise current and a low AC input impedance. So, in the finished unit I’ll buffer the volume pot.

Adding a DC offset trim and tweaking it for minimum offset also reduced 2nd harmonic at high frequencies. Again this is what Self’s theory of the input stage predicts.

The biggest improvement came by swapping out the expensive PNP matched input pair for a pair of ordinary transistors that just had high beta: BC213C’s with 350 min. as opposed to the 100 typ. of the MAT03. Saving money while boosting performance, that’s more like engineering than hi-fi 🙂

When I was finished with all this, I had a THD+N figure at 100W, 1kHz, 4.7 ohm load, of… 0.0036%! The same as the oscillator itself. The residual also looked identical to the oscillator’s own. At 100W, 10kHz, I got 0.008%, and this decreased to 0.0065% at 100W, 20kHz. (Because of the 80kHz filter, I assume.)

The 1W figures were slightly higher than the above, but from examining the residual, the extra seemed to be mostly the noise floor of the amp and oscillator, rather than crossover distortion.

These are pretty much the best results I’ve had, and I can almost imagine that if I had an Audio Precision, I’d be seeing the kinds of figures that Self claims.

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Douglas Self, Jim Williams, and a sunny Saturday morning

Writing this, I was inspired by an article by Jim Williams called “Max Wien, Bill Hewlett and a rainy Sunday afternoon”, which documents his investigation of the Wien bridge oscillator and how to lower its distortion.

1. I’m a fan of Jim Williams, and his crazy cartoons and application notes with names like “Switching Regulators for Poets”.

2. My prototype Blameless power amp was getting good enough that I needed a really low distortion oscillator to test it. Surprisingly, even my 24-bit home studio gear wasn’t good enough: sigma-delta converters generate a lot of ultrasonic noise that inflates the THD figure. And my Twintrak Pro mainly generates smoke.

3. I could not find a Tektronix SG505 or SG5010 for sale at a reasonable price.

4. Neither could I be bothered building the oscillator section of Bob Cordell’s DIY THD analyzer.

5. A search of my kitchen junk cupboard yielded a RA53 thermistor.

6. A Google search of the part number revealed that it’s the magic ingredient for making a really good Wien bridge oscillator. So, using the RA53 and a NE5532 op-amp, it only took about an hour to make an oscillator that ran off a couple of 9v batteries, and measured about 0.007% THD at 10kHz on my analyser. (The remaining THD is probably a combination of ignoring Williams’ Law, thermal modulation in the thermistor, and the dirty mains in our lab.)

7. So, this morning I tested the Blameless using my new low-distortion oscillator. It was clean enough that I could see the “gm-doubling” distortion described by Self when the amp was biased too hot: the first time this effect has ever been reproduced at Conner Labs. 🙂 Optimal bias seemed to be about 8-9mV per side, though it wasn’t clear whether this was just cancelling the oscillator distortion, and the true minimum might be at a higher idle current.

8. The results were really good. The 10kHz, 100W, 4 ohm THD came out around 0.01%. I used the 80kHz low-pass filter, but from inspection of the residual, it wasn’t filtering much: mostly the 200kHz switching noise that our mains is ridden with. At 10kHz, 2W, it was about 0.007%.

9. I cranked it up to 140W and let it get really hot. This only caused about 1mV change in bias, and checking again at 2W, the THD reading and residual looked pretty much the same. Then I rigged up a fan to cool it down again, and that didn’t make much difference either. Yay for those ThermalTrak transistors, then.

10. Renting an Audio Precision test set costs about £600/month for the entry-level one. So, I decided to call it quits at this point. The Blameless is now complete, and it just needs another channel, DC offset protection, and a box. I shall publish the schematics soon.

11. When Jim Williams was done with his oscillators, he cooked some hot dogs. I am ashamed to admit that I ate a McDonalds.

12. Now I am obsessed with trying to make a digitally controlled version of Cordell’s oscillator. 🙂

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Blameless first sound! :D

Today, after much testing with various dummy loads, including the dreaded 4 ohm reactive one (which showed up some parasitics that I managed to get rid of) the Blameless was finally plugged into a speaker.

It werks!
It werks!

Attempts to measure the THD have so far failed. They really just show up the limits of my  THD measuring system, which is currently no good for anything except finding gross faults.

For instance, the reading I previously got of 0.05% at 10kHz and 120W. When I took the amp out of circuit and connected the analyser straight to the oscillator, the THD reading increased to 0.09%.

The THD analyser does show up crossover spikes, though, if the output stage is underbiased. They were pretty much invisible by a bias voltage of 10mV per side (20mV total) which corresponded to 200mA total idle current. I set it to 13, which gives the 26mV total that some experts recommend.

Anyway, it’s working, and experimenter expectancy notwithstanding, not to mention lack of one channel, I swear it sounds better than my old MOSFET amp. Maybe there is something in Douglas Self’s claims of poor crossover distortion from MOSFETs. Once I get the other channel built and the system put together, I will make that low-distortion oscillator and do a THD shootout. Or an ABX test or something. Anyone want to lend me an Audio Precision test set? 🙂

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More Blameless progress

The Blameless project is grinding on!

.

4-layer boards for the output stages were designed in Eagle and ordered from PCB Train. Some samples of the ONSemi NJL4281/4302 transistors with built-in thermal sensing diodes were obtained. The whole lot was fitted to a large heatsink using Sil-Pad A1500 high performance thermal pad stuff.

After testing using a bench power supply, it was connected to a large transformer, rectifier and some capacitors.

The power was turned on and amazingly it failed to explode.

More detailed info to come, but the maximum output is about 120-150W into 4 ohms, the THD about 0.05% or less at 10kHz and 120W (so should be nearer 0.005% at 1kHz) and the short circuit protection, thermal compensation etc. all works as planned.

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First THD analyser results!

I’ve finally got the THD analyser hooked up and working! Not very well, though, because I have to use it with my not-too-hi-fi signal generator, on account of the analyser’s own oscillator section being AWOL. My sig gen is DDS-based, so it puts out lots of high-frequency crud and DAC quantization errors, and these overwhelm the amp’s own contribution to the residual. Except if I test at 10kHz and press the analyser’s low-pass filter button, which kind of fixes it…

Anyway, I hooked the Blameless up to an unregulated power supply to pump in plenty of hum and grunge (got to test that ripple rejection too!) and made some THD + Noise measurements.

THD test setupTHD at 50W50W residual

10kHz, 50W into 4 ohms: 0.086%

10kHz, 2W into 4 ohms: 0.037%

(I measured at 10kHz to try and force the amp to generate more noticeable THD levels. And yes I have the hi-pass button pressed: some hum is getting in somewhere…)

I also tried setting the bias pot to minimise THD.  At 50W, this happened at a setting so cold that there was barely any bias at all! I measured a Vq of around 300uV. But at 2W, the minimum occurred at a Vq (across each emitter resistor) of about 14mV.

2W THD, underbiased2W THD, bias just right2W overbiased

I think what’s happening is that at high power and high frequency, an overly cold bias helps to counteract the transistors’ slow turnoff. Too cold bias effectively starts turning them off in advance. This gives a false THD null. 2W seems to be a better power level for setting it.

At both power levels the THD nulls were very broad, and seemed to stay stable when I let the heatsink get burning hot, and then applied a fan to cool it back down.

Still a long way to go in terms of refining the THD measuring setup… but it’s a start!

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Blameless short circuit protection

So, now the short-circuit protection is tested.

I used a dual-slope VI limiter as described by Self in his book, except I simulated it in LTSpice and played with the component values to lower the power dissipation a little. Self’s original design allowed the transistors to dissipate nearly their full rated 250W, and I thought that was excessive, since it’s only possible at a case temperature of 25’C, and that will never happen in practice.

I guess his reasoning is that since the amp will only amplify AC signals, then under short-circuit conditions each transistor will conduct with a duty cycle of 50%, so the mean dissipation will only be 125W. But I can imagine situations where that wouldn’t work.I also plan to try the NJL4281/NJL4302 transistors in the future, and these have less SOA than the MJ15024/MJ15025, the devices that Self designed the circuit for.

My new values were supposed to make the circuit limit at about 125W. Anyway, so I made the circuit up and tested it with the method described on Rod Elliot’s site. Namely, I shorted the amp’s output with a 0.1 ohm resistor, and fed 100us pulses at a repetition rate of 10Hz to the input. I did this with the amp running off two regulated supplies, allowing me to vary the rail voltage and note the current for each voltage.

At first, the negative rail had no limiting at all! It started out at 12A and headed skyward from there. It turned out that I put a diode in backwards, and also the gain of the PNP limiter transistor was low, and the VAS current limit was a little high. Once I got that fixed, I plotted out the two sets of results in Excel, and added loadlines for reactive and resistive loads on 40V rails.

Protection locus

So you can see that with one pair of output transistors installed, we can just barely drive a 4 ohm resistive load or an 8 ohm reactive one. To drive a 4 ohm reactive load, we’d need two pairs, which is what I was expecting, and two pairs is what I plan to fit.

Finally as a sanity check I rigged up a reactive load: A big iron cored choke wound with about 80 turns of heavy wire. I put two 4.7 ohm resistors in series with it, and it could drive that easily at any frequency. Go down to one 4.7 ohm resistor, and I found a frequency where the limiter would activate and cause crazy clipping, like in Rod Elliot’s Figure 4 linked above. Again this agrees with what I expected, so we’re good to continue!

Note that before trying this test, I added the catch diodes from the speaker output back to the rails. Otherwise the output devices would be destroyed when the limiter kicked in.