Tube Headphone Amplifier II


Posted on Nov 25, 2012

This is the schematic of the final design including the tone stack but leaving out the volume, balance, and sonic controls. The right half of the circuit is John Broskie's original White cathode amplifier with a pair of 5687s as output tubes. This lowers the output impedance to about 27 ohms (gain remains the same) and allows me to set the quiescent current at 17mA per section to preserve tube life while still achieving high current swings with lower distortion. I've increased the size of the output capacitor to get a better lower frequency response at lower load impedances and added good quality audio caps in parallel with the electrolytics. I also added a fuse after the output capacitors to protect the headphones just in case the electrolytic fails someday.


Tube Headphone Amplifier II
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

The 10M resistors (R5 and R13) on the grids of the 12AU7s are not strictly necessary. I included them, however, because I was going to build the amp in stages. I knew that at some point I would want to power it up to measure bias voltages before the volume and tone controls were wired. I needed these resistors to ground the grids and set the proper bias points. I could have just as easily used temporary clip leads to ground the grids when measuring voltages, but adding resistors was not that much extra trouble. The Fender tone stack is a pure boost tone stack. Unlike the equally well-known Baxandall tone stack, the Fender stack cannot provide bass or treble cut. But, since I never listen with bass or treble cut, the Fender stack offered fewer components and complete capacitor coupling thereby avoiding the use of an additional coupling capacitor from the plate of V1. Like all tone stacks, the Fender tone stack has an insertion loss, in this case approximately 18dB. The "boost" actually comes relative to this loss. In the Fender stack, the mid control is only really active if there is bass and/or treble boost. When the bass/treble controls are off the mid control becomes another volume control. The parts of the stack form several high-pass filters. The upper part is a high-pass filter through the 250pF capacitor into the treble control whose wiper feeds the next stage. The high-pass bass filter (through the 0.47uF...




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