| ▲ | dvh a day ago | |||||||
If I may recommend, replace output LM386 stage with any dual opamp (e.g. another NE5532 or TL072, slightly different schematic of course), they can drive 32 ohm headphone speakers without issue and have significantly (~100x) lower white noise. | ||||||||
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh a day ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
You can drive even 8 ohm headphones to unpleasantly loud levels with any opamp and a pair of transistors to beef up the output, along with a resistor to sort out the biasing. I did something like this as a headphone driver amp for "desktop mobile" radios used as part of a communications centre for a large festival. Motorola had a device that would do it, for about 500 quid each. I built the thing in the PDF at the bottom (I must have rerendered this at some point, it was definitely not done in 2022, more like 2012). Using cheap bag-of-1000-for-a-fiver Chinese transistors off eBay I was able to get incredibly quiet output, to the point that I needed to add a muting gate because the radio was objectionably noisy. I notice that the exact transistors are not mentioned but any small-signal NPN and PNP ones will do - I used BC548 and BC558s, like I use in everything. It will be way quieter and way more stable than an LM386. Edit: I'm a lot better at drawing things in Kicad these days, and would have left the capacitors at the input a lot tidier. | ||||||||
| ▲ | RossBencina a day ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
The schematic in the linked article shows an NE5532. | ||||||||
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