Hello everyone,
First a little background, I've built a few tube amps and my main gigging amp is a 50W Marshall style amp.
I'm currently carrying around a smaller 8W (6K6 power tubes) backup amp, which sounds really fine but it's far from being powerful enough for my needs. Monitoring is often deficient and I need my amp to be loud enough to get a nice stage balance with the drums pounding, not to mention the occasionnal gig where the PA can only provide vocal support.
So my plan is to build (cause i love building!) a SS amp that can rival with the 50W tube amp (which is really about 75W clean!) volume-wise (note that I rarely get to go into power amp overdrive territory). The 2nd part of the problem is that the cabinet is 16 ohm. This is not a problem with a tube amp, but it is with a SS amp.
Now, I discovered this forum and I fell in love with it! After much reading, it seems that cascading a pair of LM3886 with a 35V+/- supply would get me about 100W RMS (200W peak) into 16ohms. To be fair, I used to have a Line6 Flextone XL which had 2 LM3886 (stereo) and found it rather weak, but I'll be using a closed-back cabinet, which helps a lot.
I notice tech-diy.com sells a bridged LM4780 PCB, this would make the power amp build a piece of cake! But extracting this much power from a single chip seems maybe a bit risky. We're talking an amp could be running at full tilt for hours at a time (once played a 4h30 straight gig!). We're talking a big heatsink and probably a fan.
Another option is a stereo LM3886 kit from chipamp.com, then I run them bridged by feeding one an inverted signal and hooking up their outputs appropriately. By having the chips farther appart, or even on separate heatsinks, seems it could run cooler. But I still have the same power to dissipate.
There are also a couple discrete circuits circulating on the internet, but a chip amp seems like a safe birst SS build.
For the PSU, I like Hammond cause they are cheap to me being in Canada, they have a 225VA toro PT that would do a good job. Big fat bridge rectifiers and caps are cheap and plentiful at the local surplus store.
Does that seems like a good plan? Double 3886 or single 4780?
Thanks
First a little background, I've built a few tube amps and my main gigging amp is a 50W Marshall style amp.
I'm currently carrying around a smaller 8W (6K6 power tubes) backup amp, which sounds really fine but it's far from being powerful enough for my needs. Monitoring is often deficient and I need my amp to be loud enough to get a nice stage balance with the drums pounding, not to mention the occasionnal gig where the PA can only provide vocal support.
So my plan is to build (cause i love building!) a SS amp that can rival with the 50W tube amp (which is really about 75W clean!) volume-wise (note that I rarely get to go into power amp overdrive territory). The 2nd part of the problem is that the cabinet is 16 ohm. This is not a problem with a tube amp, but it is with a SS amp.
Now, I discovered this forum and I fell in love with it! After much reading, it seems that cascading a pair of LM3886 with a 35V+/- supply would get me about 100W RMS (200W peak) into 16ohms. To be fair, I used to have a Line6 Flextone XL which had 2 LM3886 (stereo) and found it rather weak, but I'll be using a closed-back cabinet, which helps a lot.
I notice tech-diy.com sells a bridged LM4780 PCB, this would make the power amp build a piece of cake! But extracting this much power from a single chip seems maybe a bit risky. We're talking an amp could be running at full tilt for hours at a time (once played a 4h30 straight gig!). We're talking a big heatsink and probably a fan.
Another option is a stereo LM3886 kit from chipamp.com, then I run them bridged by feeding one an inverted signal and hooking up their outputs appropriately. By having the chips farther appart, or even on separate heatsinks, seems it could run cooler. But I still have the same power to dissipate.
There are also a couple discrete circuits circulating on the internet, but a chip amp seems like a safe birst SS build.
For the PSU, I like Hammond cause they are cheap to me being in Canada, they have a 225VA toro PT that would do a good job. Big fat bridge rectifiers and caps are cheap and plentiful at the local surplus store.
Does that seems like a good plan? Double 3886 or single 4780?
Thanks