Headphone amp power supply

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floppybootstomp
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Joined: Wed Feb 18, 2009 10:37 pm
Location: Greenwich

#1 Headphone amp power supply

Post by floppybootstomp »

I ordered one of These Headphone Amps recently and made a 20 volt PSU using one of These Vellman Kit Boards and This Toroidal.

As soon as I connect the PSU to the amp it goes down to 5 volts and the amp isn't powered. The amp is listed as requiring 2A current and the board I've used for regulation is only capable of supplying 1A so I'm assuming this is why - correct?

If so I have a few beefy electrolytics and a suitable bridge rectifier to hand so would using those and a 20 volt regulator be adequate?

Apart from that the amp's headphone socket was faulty on arrival, had to wiggle the jack to get intermittent signals through the headphones. So I took out the board and checked for dry joints, couldn't see any but soldered up anyway - socket still knackered.

So I've removed that and flown a new stereo jack socket and the pair of input phono sockets. I intend to also fly the DC power connection, volume pot and line level out socket and put it in a new case. The mosfet heat sinks get very hot so I may also add bigger heat sinks or a small near-silent fan.

Build quality, notably the soldering, was not of a very high quality on this thing and to my ears it doesn't really sound all that good. I've only used the output from an I-Pod dock so far and initially it distorted past about 25% on the headphone pot. So I put a volume control between dock and amp and this improved things.

Any tweaks for this thing? I shall wait until I have a stable PSU and try it with my main system.
Relevant boxes ticked - certified loony
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