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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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When a man is tired of tires…

Yes, another gripping blog post about bicycle tires!

First of all, big up the Bontrager Hard Case, a “puncture-proof” tyre for road bikes. I put them on my commuter bike and have had 0 punctures so far, down from an average of 2 per week with the stock tyres.

Second, fat rims need fat tyres! I run Sun Mammoth rims on my Stinky, and Alastair at Wheelcraft persuaded me that it’s OK to run regular sized MTB tyres on them. His “loaf of bread theory” is that the tyre works better sat inside a wide rim like a loaf of bread in a baking tin, than bulging out of a narrow rim like a Starbucks muffin. Well, he’s wrong. I put a 2.5″ Big Earl on the front, in place of the old 2.25″ tyre, and the bike corners so much better it’s unreal. I think the narrower tyre ends up with a flattened tread profile that stops the contact patch from assuming the right shape when you lean into a corner. Like putting a car tyre on your motorbike. It kind of works on the back, but you wouldn’t want it on the front.

Finally, an apology to the Conti Gravity tyre that I bitched about a few posts ago. I got hate mail from someone who lives next door to the Conti factory 😉 I put it on the front of my Inbred and it works great. It’s just a bit wussy to be a back tyre on a freeride bike.