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Since the unveiling of our A series amplifiers and before, I get the occasional email that reads "hey, I know you're busy, but could you design a few amps for me real quick" It usually makes me giggle a little and then smh. It takes me back to 1999 right before I started with RF. I also had no idea what was involved designing an amplifier from the ground up. No disrespect intended if you are reading this and have asked me to make you some amps before. How would you know what is involved if you haven't done it before? This has prompted me to go through literally thousands of photos on my phone and pull off any amplifier design pictures that have to do with the new amplifiers we just introduced. I will make my best attempt at posting them here in chronological order, and make some brief comments here and there. I also threw in a few pictures of my daughter taken during those times as a measure of time. The A series amplifiers are a direct COPY of the home audio amplifier I designed for my own use (changed power supply to 12VDC, added fans, remote turn on, balanced/unbalanced input and ability to put it into Class A/B mode (home amp is always class A)) so I have included the photos of designing that as well because all of the time I spent developing the circuits went directly into the mobile amplifiers. Ok enough of me talking.. On with the show! Before I build any circuit I like to try to simulate it in PSPICE, here you see a nice clean output and the predicted distortion My daughter was born during this time Here you see the power supply for the home amp. AC to DC supplies like this are very easy to design. The small circuit board is the input stage and voltage amplifier stage. This is where a lot of the magic is and many months of reading and testing were done to get it to work. Unfortunately I couldn't find any pictures during that time. We went through at least 3 different voltage amplifier designs, PCBs and testing before we came up with what we use today. Moved tested input stage and voltage amplifier stage onto main PCB instead of it having it's own PCB. (In the car amp it still has its own PCB for the least amount of noise possible) Each tiny resistor and transistor has been studied for voltage, current, and power dissipation. Prototyping the current amplifier stage It works! Now lets build 2 voltage amplifiers, 2 current amplifiers, connect them together and add a power supply! We also added a prototype SMD VU-DIN meter for S&G. Ok let's put this contraption in some kind of case so we can move it around without breaking anything. A SMD AD-1 Amp Dyno prototype case worked well Keeping the same case, I designed a simple face plate for it and had my machine shop CNC it. We put it all together with some prototype meters. Shown here on the distortion analyzer making a sweet ass sine wave with only 0.0068% THD! WHOA! Cleanest amp i've ever tested, home, pro, or car.
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