OK, thanks again to everyone who participated.

Again, the limiter topology is way beyond my electronics knowledge to figure out a circuit myself, but hey, I've at least learnt a lot about limiters in this thread 

JM Fahey: that preamp attenuation / level matching thing sounds interesting. I might get back to you on that once I'm actually building the amp.

First of all, thanks.

Roly, I do apologize for my "code", I figured the diy-guitar-electronics-community was small enough for it to be obvious.

I've decided I'm way out of my depth here - so one more long-shot and then I'll do as J.M. Fahey suggested - preamp first, then lm386, then something bigger - the longshot being this circuit: http://www.electroschematics.com/138/dynamic-compressor-passive-components-no-power-supply/

Would it be worth to try this between (a tube-)preamp and (a tda7240a) poweramp? Not looking for some holy grail tone here, I just find the concept of limiter + ss-poweramp interesting...

Thanks for your expansive answer. I got the idea that the STA540 has a limiter from someone who posted just that in the orange microterror thread over at fsb - and the datasheet says under 6.7.3. Clipping detection: "Current sinking at pin 10 occurs when a certain distortion level is reached at each output. This function initiates a gain-compression facility whenever the amplifier is overdriven." I had no idea what that meant and just interpreted this as the limiter mentioned by the fsb-member...

But seeing as the micro-terror has no limiter then and sounds actually quite good (at least according to youtube videos) - I'll probably won't need one for my project as well.

However, should there be a relatively simple way to implement a limiter with, say, a tda7240 I'd love to try it just out of curiosity. I don't want to build a limiter that has more parts then the rest of the amp though...

Edit: I renamed the topic to so it's no longer limited to the lm386

OK, thought so... would you mind explaining me why, just out of curiosity? What difference does it make wether the amp is 1/2 or 20 watts? Isn't the limiter's purpose to improve the sound by preventing the chip from clipping?
Please bear in mind, I'm quite new to SS amp topology.

My decision on the LM386 isn't final btw, if you can point me to a ~10-20W amp that isn't much more elaborate (and runs with 12V), I might consider it.

hi,

i'm thinking of building a hybrid amp, (tube preamp and lm386 poweramp), and whilst reading up on solid state / hybrid topology, one thing that often came up was a limiter to prevent the ss poweramp from clipping, which makes sense to me. The only circuit I found that was actually used in guitar amps was the VOX limiter (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/rickydon/media/voxtmixlmt.gif.html), which I find too complicated to implement for such a simple project.

1) does a limiter actually make sense for a simple lm386 chip amp, or am I overthinking this?

2) could I just use something simple like this: http://www.261.gr/limiters.html ?

3) apparently the STA540 (that is used in the orange microterror) has a built-in limiter - is someone aware of a chip more similar to the lm386 in terms of simplicity, footprint and that is proven and tested as guitar amp?

Does anyone have any other simple ideas? Or is it overkill anyway?