Troubleshooting diy audio circuit
When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. Touch device users, explore by touch or with swipe gestures. Log in. Sign up.
===We are searching data for your request:
Wait the end of the search in all databases.
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.
Content:
- LM386 Audio Probe Amplifier
- 5 Common Audio System Problems and Their Solutions
- Class D Audio Amplifiers: What, Why, and How
- Troubleshooting diy audio circuit
- How to Troubleshoot Any Amplifier: Start with trivial problems.
- Memphis Amp Troubleshooting
- Signal Injector Circuits for Quick Troubleshooting of all Audio Equipment
- Troubleshooting Your Build
- How to Repair an Audio Amplifier With a Tutorial
- 150 Watt Amplifier Circuit – DIY Guide to Build Amplifier
LM386 Audio Probe Amplifier
I ain't gonna lie. You won't be a master troubleshooter after reading a couple pages here. Hopefully, what I can do is give you the ability to form a logical plan of attack. From that comes self confidence, knowing that there is a deterministic way to solve problems, without a lot of trial and error and without resorting to the dreaded scattergun approach of random part swapping.
Troubleshooting is done mostly with the mind, not with the soldering iron. We all have problems that get the better of us, at least for a while, but approaching the situation as an interesting puzzle, rather than an unpleasant task to be suffered through, will make the work go quickly. Success will come from a 3-prong approach, a combination of understanding the circuit, having the means to test it and being in the right frame of mind to correctly interpret the test data.
Never underestimate that third component. Almost all my mistakes come from charging down the "obvious" path, positive that my early tests have revealed the one true solution, only to find that there was more than one explanation for the data and in my excitement and haste, I chose the wrong one.
We have to consider everything from safety to test equipment to how to attack various components. I've tried to break the write-up down into very short sections on each topic so you can go directly to what you need, but please give the whole thing a good read at least once. Troubleshooting is inherently hazardous. The nature of service requires that equipment covers be removed for access to live circuit components. Because the equipment is faulty in some way, dangerous voltages may appear at unexpected points.
Being safe means taking every reasonable precaution to avoid the known dangers, but it also requires taking measures to protect yourself from non-obvious dangers. The following list has been compiled from various sources plus personal experience, but it is by no means complete.
Please consider each item carefully. Safety glasses- Even a small capacitor can burst and shoot the can off like a bullet. Clipped component leads can travel many feet and pierce flesh. Hot solder and flux can spatter.
It only takes one incident to do damage that affects you for the rest of your life. Without fail, wear safety glasses! Pull the plug- Unless a device has to be powered for a test, physically remove the plug from the socket. Put one hand behind your back- When probing and measuring high voltage circuits, don't allow a current path through your heart. Probe with one hand in your pocket or behind your back. Around, never over- Dropped tools land where they can do the most damage.
Get in the habit of moving and directing tools around the unit rather than directly over it. This avoids dropping pliers and such across charged capacitor terminals and bending or breaking small irreplaceable components. Isolation transformer- some equipment is powered directly from the line, switching power supplies for example.
You must use an isolation transformer to work on these safely. Cheater plugs- Do not use "cheater plugs" to isolate ground on test equipment. This was often done to reduce noise levels or to make floating measurements that put the chassis of the test equipment at some voltage other than ground. It's extremely dangerous. Use equipment that can make differential floating measurement instead. It should be very high. If not, find out why before going any further.
If you have the equipment, and especially if doing work for somebody else, do a HiPot test. Measure the resistance from the mains ground to the chassis. It should be close to zero. Some audio equipment may have ground loop breaks. In that case you should measure about 10 ohms with 1 diode drop in each direction with your meter on "diode check".
Make up a discharge tool using insulated leads and a low value resistor, say 50 ohms and 5 watts, for safely discharging power supply and other capacitors. Use it! Here's an example of hazardous voltages being present in unexpected places. I powered up a vintage Stromberg Carlson amplifier to test it.
It had passed resistance checks from the chassis to both mains terminals with the power switch on. These amps have no capacitors from line to ground, and are fully transformer isolated, so it should have been safe. In spite of that, when I connected the scope ground to the speaker ground, there was a flash, a bang and the end of the connector was partially burned away.
Subsequent measurements again showed no shorts to the line. It turned out that the amp had a broken circuit breaker. A metal washer came loose and jammed between the mains connection and the chassis inside the circuit breaker, putting the chassis at VAC. The connection wasn't good enough to catch with the low voltage ohm meter, but it was a dead short at VAC.
You can't catch every hidden problem, but by working one handed until everything is safely grounded you can avoid disaster. If I had grabbed the amp with one hand, and the grounded scope with the other, the outcome could have been far worse.
A good lawyer always has his or her paperwork in order and documents everything. In our case that means finding a schematic for the device in question, plus anything else that might be useful.
That would include operators manuals, advertising and technical service bulletins. It would also mean scanning the various Internet forums to see if anyone has traveled this road before.
There may be times when you have to work without a schematic but it's never easy. If you can't get the exact schematic, possibly you can find a similar model that has circuitry in common.
Do everything in your power to get some kind of documentation. Now that you've got it, read the documentation including the owners manual. If you don't know how it's supposed to work, how do you know it's broken and how will you tell when it's fixed? This seems like something you could skip over, as I usually did, but I recently helped repair an amplifier where the outputs were wired differently than I was used to.
Only by reading the owners manual could one avoid inadvertently shorting them out while testing. Unless you already know the equipment inside out, read the documentation! Document the work as you go.
Draw diagrams, take photos and make notes. One good photo will show where wires went and how capacitors and other parts were installed. Even the best of us get confused about polarity every now and then or forget whether the red wire or the green wire went to that lug. Sometimes PCBs are mislabeled, schematics can have errors and even components like diodes and tantalum caps have been known to have the markings reversed. If you take a photo you'll at least know what you started with.
A good lawyer won't ask the witness a question unless he already knows what the answer should be. When you make a measurement, be sure you have some idea what the answer should be. If you don't have a range of values in mind, you need to study the circuit.
Measurements steer our actions so it's important to get clear answers that prove parts are either guilty or innocent. Forward progress depends on this! You need to develop the skills and confidence to declare a part good and move on. If you don't, you'll have continuous doubt about what's working and what isn't; you'll go around in circles or end up replacing perfectly good parts.
Shotgun troubleshooting is bad troubleshooting. Reaching that happy state of confidence means fully understanding the various types of parts and the methods used to test them. We'll cover that in detail further on. There is a certain minimum collection of equipment needed to efficiently test and troubleshoot electronics. It's possible to do the job with less, but you'll spend more time and be less certain of your results.
If you intend to do this regularly, work towards having at least the following on your bench:. A hamfest, eBay, Craigslist or regular electronics supplier will get you most of these items for very little money. In a pinch, the signal source could even be a CD player and good work has certainly been done with a non-controlled 25 watt pencil iron. The one item that isn't cheap, but I consider essential for those serious about this sort of work, is the LCR meter.
You must combine it with an esr meter for useful measurements. Actually, an esr meter alone is more valuable for troubleshooting than a C-meter without loss. Another possibility, though much slower to operate and requiring a bit more knowledge, is a traditional LCR bridge. The General Radio A or B is a common example.
There are also plans on this site for building your own from scratch. It's a very easy project. An Internet search will turn up various plans for a DIY esr meter as well.
If you don't do this sort of work often, PC-based test equipment is another possibility. My personal feeling is that PC-based test equipment isn't usually as efficient as having dedicated single purpose devices with real knobs and buttons, nor is it as robust, but the capabilities can't be denied.
Using the sound inputs or an external USB sound card and a free program like Visual Analyser, you can have an oscilloscope, FFT spectrum analyzer, signal generator and LCR meter for almost no investment at all. The remarkable thing about initial assumptions is how often they're wrong.

5 Common Audio System Problems and Their Solutions
Class D amplifiers, first proposed in , have become increasingly popular in recent years. What are Class D amplifiers? How do they compare with other kinds of amplifiers? Why is Class D of interest for audio?
Class D Audio Amplifiers: What, Why, and How
Note: Editable PCB files are available for this project here. The reason for its popularity is due to its very low distortion, minimal external components, and low cost. With the right layout and component selection, you can build an excellent sounding Hi-Fi audio amplifier that will rival high-end amps retailing for several thousand dollars or more. My amplifier is based off of the same circuit provided in the datasheet, with all of the optional stability components included. I highly recommend reading the datasheet before building your amplifier. It has all of the performance specifications, absolute maximum ratings, schematics, and design tips:. LM Datasheet. Application note AN has additional information that fills in gaps left out of the datasheet. It also has schematics for bridged and parallel amplifier circuits:.
Troubleshooting diy audio circuit

Synthrotek will always try its best to provide builders with accurate and useful building instructions, however problems and errors are unavoidable due to various reasons. This page is dedicated to helping builders figure out what could be wrong with their circuit or build, and how to hopefully fix it. Here is a list of the most common issues that we see and please go through this list one-by-one if you are having any problems. Please do this before sending a support email if possible, most likely we will give you the same information.
How to Troubleshoot Any Amplifier: Start with trivial problems.
Listen to this article instead 14 minutes. This is, of course, after you have eliminated the possibility of trivial problems. Listening to what if anything comes out of the speakers can help you isolate the problem to specific parts of the circuit. If you hear no sound coming from the speakers — including hum, hiss, reverb crash, input cable pop, or any other incidental, non-musical sounds — the problem could be the speaker itself. But, if you hear non-audio sound coming from the speakers , the problem is likely , although not guaranteed, to be a fault in the preamp section of the circuit.
Memphis Amp Troubleshooting
I ain't gonna lie. You won't be a master troubleshooter after reading a couple pages here. Hopefully, what I can do is give you the ability to form a logical plan of attack. From that comes self confidence, knowing that there is a deterministic way to solve problems, without a lot of trial and error and without resorting to the dreaded scattergun approach of random part swapping. Troubleshooting is done mostly with the mind, not with the soldering iron. We all have problems that get the better of us, at least for a while, but approaching the situation as an interesting puzzle, rather than an unpleasant task to be suffered through, will make the work go quickly. Success will come from a 3-prong approach, a combination of understanding the circuit, having the means to test it and being in the right frame of mind to correctly interpret the test data. Never underestimate that third component.
Signal Injector Circuits for Quick Troubleshooting of all Audio Equipment
Memphis Amp Troubleshooting. Martin Music is Memphis' full service guitar store. Very happy See more.
Troubleshooting Your Build
RELATED VIDEO: Homemade Audio Amplifier Project: (Part 1) Fixing issuesThis simple signal injector circuits explained below can be accurately used for troubleshooting and alignment applications of all kinds of audio and high frequency equipment. One of the extremely handy devices for repairing audio and high frequency instruments is without question a equipment that will give you a modulated frequency to allow tracing the path of the signal via the circuit. Although the overall circuit part number is 40, just about five of these are inside the i. By correctly joining the four gates of the IC as shown above, configures a multivibrator square wave generator having a fundamental frequency within the full audio range. Therefore the generator could be used to for troubleshooting all types audio equipment along with VHF, UHF receiver circuits. The completed device could be tested by attaching a pair of headphones between the probe terminal and chassis negative clip of the circuit.
How to Repair an Audio Amplifier With a Tutorial
Published On : August 5, Most audio system problems are a result of improper, defective, or wrongly connected cables. Some problems also arise due to wrong equipment use or improper maintenance. The world of audio can seem simple, but it can get quite complicated and hard to understand, especially to those who are not AV enthusiasts. Audio systems can have a lot of components, wires, settings, and standards, adding to the confusion. No wonder, people are moving to simpler systems like soundbars for added convenience, but at the expense of audio quality. However, the next time you face any issue with your audio system, you need not worry.
150 Watt Amplifier Circuit – DIY Guide to Build Amplifier
You finished your DIY project, but it doesn't work. You don't have any test gear, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any idea how to use it. You're screwed, right? There's a lot of troubleshooting you can do without any test gear or electronics background.
I think he is wrong. I'm sure. I am able to prove it. Write to me in PM, speak.
Are we all private messages sent today?