Happy new year 🎉 John. Could you please make video about how to utilize capacitor multiplier to reduce supply noise? For noob like me its pretty difficult to understand how to properly build and utilize capacitor multiplier 😄
Honestly, John, you and the lm386 chip are the reason why I started a TH-cam channel! You have inspired and educated me for a DECADE, and I thank you for that. Snickers is still on the bench next to you in spirit. Happy New Year!!!
Back in the early 1980s I had to design a 600Ω line driver and the LM386 was an available component. With a 9V rail, it would not meet the power and distortion spec, but the output transformer was center tapped, so the LM386 drove the center tap (through a capacitor). Because it is an inverting amplifier, you can put (decoupled) resistors around it to get negative feedback, and I used this to synthesise the required 150Ω output impedance. It also improved the distortion and frequency response IIRC.
Happy new year! The latest videos with the added analysis are great! Watching your videos for so many years I've learned a lot about audio electronics! A big thank you for your work! Greetings from Greece!
Happy New Year! The LM386 was an inexpensive way of driving a speaker for low-mid quality applications, but I always found it produced quite a lot of hiss.
I love the LM386. I think because of its simplicity and ubiquity. I’ve been planning for years to build a practice cigar box guitar amp, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
7:24 that curve make sense, as it's a small amp used in many voice applications (intercom, phones, cheap walkie talkies, etc), where "intelligibility" lives on those mid frequencies. It's a really nice little amp :)
If you need a little amplification a 386 can do that. There's a few different variants of the LM386. You must have one of the high performance ones there. I thought they conked out mostly at around 325 mW or so. I've seen a schematic where a pair of LM386s were setup in a push pull configuration. That's always intrigued me. Although it hardly makes any sense. If you need more power then use a different chip. Still, goofy stuff like that has a way of appealing to me. I'm looking forward to your LM386 replacement IC video. You have a Happy New Year John. You and your asylum.
Happy new year John ! LM386 needed love and needed to be taken to the asylum, and I wouldn't trust anyone else ! and proved what we all knew and that's that the LM386 does exactly what it says on the tin and does it well ! I'm looking forward to your journeys into the Asylum and out again !
Cool video. I tested many of these amps on a Philips cd player test jig. I was just listening. The lm386 was just ok, it works and was reliable. The tda7267 is obsolete. The OPA134 was just amazing. Interesting to see what measurement devices see on these.
It is a very handy chip with lots of use. Not so much for Hi-Fi but things like a doorphone or even a tiny diy internetradio. The bigest advantage ist that this chip is so easy to use, no problems with instability for example as long as the wiring is not completely cracy...
Hola John! soy profe del laboratorio de electrónica en una escuela publica de formación profesional, en mi materia los estudiantes deben construir varios circuitos y entre ellos esta el famoso 386!!! Saludos desde Argentina
Happy New Year, John and everyone else too. This is a cool series. Just my opinion but such a low powered amp wouldn't usually be expected to drive small speakers at low frequency. So it's probably performing as it is designed and needed to.
I use them for audio output stages in most of my homebrew HAM radio designs. Most interested in about 300-3k frequency driving either headphones or a small desktop speaker (half a watt or so). They work fantastically in that application, never really see added distortion in the audio stage with a little judicious capacitor selection.
Would have liked to have seen a flash of the schematic, I know I could look it up or see the previous video. But if it's single ended I'm wondering if that base distortion is partly second harmonic from a voltage divider somehere (maybe internal) not holding true. Dave Clark designed and published a second harmonic generator somewhere but I never found it. It was adjustable from nearly no distortion to higher amounts. Would be fun to play with. I'll have to try and search Audio Amature again...
Would love to see you show how to use a 386 as a driver for a voltage follower/current gain stage, in order to drive lower impedance loads for deeper bass and higher power. Yeah, I can look it up. And I have before. But I like your explanations over most boring tech sites.
Happy New Year John... everyone, I use this spider to amplify my FM Pirate receiver, Works (WITH ME!) fine! ( an automatic volume control would be a nice addition! ) Healthy and Friendly Greetings from the Netherlands / Rotterdam Rob
Hi, how do you determine wich level of input set for the sweep analysis? hola, como determina con que nivel de entrada hacer los tests? que nivel de entrada usó para barrer en frecuencia? gracias
i once made a wierd amp with that chip where i had to go above 12v so i used 16 orm speaker and it worked pretty much flawlesly even though i think 12v was not recomended while 16 with poor regulation wastotaly bonkers but it never blew up
I tried several times and never managed to get any of my LM386s to work properly. I guess I just never put together the proper layout. Never had that many problems with other chips.
I use to think the LM386 was junk and was going to replace one with a TDA7052 which has a full bridge output and no output capacitor. I used the little amplifier in a bench test speaker that runs on a 9V battery. I found that the TDA7052 had more than double the quiescent current so I guess the LM386 wasn't so bad after all. You mentioned the TDA7267 and I looked up the quiescent current on that one... 20ma! Not so good for 9V battery operation.
hall i send you some mix2037? it's like lm386 but class-d, and unlike most other similar chips it is very good, claiming 0.02% distortion... I use it quite often and i like it.
I think you may have erred regarding the distortion at 20kHz. It looks to me like about 0.6% rather than the 0.11% that you stated (@ 7:50 in the video)
Indeed. I always thought of the 386 as a quick and dirty gain block. And if you're willing to exploit both inputs and/or the bypass pins, you'll ind a few more weird tricks. It helped that for years, it was an off the shelf item at Radio Shack back when getting ICs of any kind was more of an ordeal for the DIY crowd.
Happy New Year everyone! My first video of 2025. Lots more chip amplifiers to test and other projects planned for the channel this year.
Happy new year 🎉 John. Could you please make video about how to utilize capacitor multiplier to reduce supply noise? For noob like me its pretty difficult to understand how to properly build and utilize capacitor multiplier 😄
Thats awesome!!!
Happy New Year, John. Thanks for starting off 2025 with a smile.
How about a super simple amp with a chip front end?
Honestly, John, you and the lm386 chip are the reason why I started a TH-cam channel! You have inspired and educated me for a DECADE, and I thank you for that. Snickers is still on the bench next to you in spirit. Happy New Year!!!
Happy New-Year!
Thank You!
Back in the early 1980s I had to design a 600Ω line driver and the LM386 was an available component. With a 9V rail, it would not meet the power and distortion spec, but the output transformer was center tapped, so the LM386 drove the center tap (through a capacitor). Because it is an inverting amplifier, you can put (decoupled) resistors around it to get negative feedback, and I used this to synthesise the required 150Ω output impedance. It also improved the distortion and frequency response IIRC.
Happy new year! The latest videos with the added analysis are great! Watching your videos for so many years I've learned a lot about audio electronics!
A big thank you for your work!
Greetings from Greece!
Happy New Year! The LM386 was an inexpensive way of driving a speaker for low-mid quality applications, but I always found it produced quite a lot of hiss.
I love the LM386. I think because of its simplicity and ubiquity. I’ve been planning for years to build a practice cigar box guitar amp, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
7:24 that curve make sense, as it's a small amp used in many voice applications (intercom, phones, cheap walkie talkies, etc), where "intelligibility" lives on those mid frequencies. It's a really nice little amp :)
If you need a little amplification a 386 can do that. There's a few different variants of the LM386. You must have one of the high performance ones there. I thought they conked out mostly at around 325 mW or so. I've seen a schematic where a pair of LM386s were setup in a push pull configuration. That's always intrigued me. Although it hardly makes any sense. If you need more power then use a different chip. Still, goofy stuff like that has a way of appealing to me. I'm looking forward to your LM386 replacement IC video. You have a Happy New Year John. You and your asylum.
Others share your curiosity about the push pull I promise. John’s channel is really fun.
“Amplification” 😂
Clicked so fast I think I sprained my finger, John!
Love the LM386. Very handy chip.
Thanks for another great video and have a blessed New Year!
Happy new year john , this was a perfect video idea for new year
Happy new year John ! LM386 needed love and needed to be taken to the asylum, and I wouldn't trust anyone else ! and proved what we all knew and that's that the LM386 does exactly what it says on the tin and does it well ! I'm looking forward to your journeys into the Asylum and out again !
Cool video. I tested many of these amps on a Philips cd player test jig. I was just listening. The lm386 was just ok, it works and was reliable. The tda7267 is obsolete. The OPA134 was just amazing. Interesting to see what measurement devices see on these.
It is always nice to be able to quantify things. With the quant asylum!
It is a very handy chip with lots of use. Not so much for Hi-Fi but things like a doorphone or even a tiny diy internetradio. The bigest advantage ist that this chip is so easy to use, no problems with instability for example as long as the wiring is not completely cracy...
You are definitely a reference in audio electronics. Have a great 2025!
Hola John! soy profe del laboratorio de electrónica en una escuela publica de formación profesional, en mi materia los estudiantes deben construir varios circuitos y entre ellos esta el famoso 386!!! Saludos desde Argentina
I used it for headphone amplifier for a while but it has too much white noise when used with headphones (32ohm).
Happy New Year, John and everyone else too.
This is a cool series.
Just my opinion but such a low powered amp wouldn't usually be expected to drive small speakers at low frequency. So it's probably performing as it is designed and needed to.
I use them for audio output stages in most of my homebrew HAM radio designs. Most interested in about 300-3k frequency driving either headphones or a small desktop speaker (half a watt or so). They work fantastically in that application, never really see added distortion in the audio stage with a little judicious capacitor selection.
Would have liked to have seen a flash of the schematic, I know I could look it up or see the previous video. But if it's single ended I'm wondering if that base distortion is partly second harmonic from a voltage divider somehere (maybe internal) not holding true.
Dave Clark designed and published a second harmonic generator somewhere but I never found it. It was adjustable from nearly no distortion to higher amounts. Would be fun to play with. I'll have to try and search Audio Amature again...
The 386 makes a good buzzer.
Would love to see you show how to use a 386 as a driver for a voltage follower/current gain stage, in order to drive lower impedance loads for deeper bass and higher power.
Yeah, I can look it up. And I have before. But I like your explanations over most boring tech sites.
Happy New Year John... everyone, I use this spider to amplify my FM Pirate receiver, Works (WITH ME!) fine! ( an automatic volume control would be a nice addition! )
Healthy and Friendly Greetings from the Netherlands / Rotterdam Rob
Ah, the venerable LM386. I built a simple amp with one of them for my TRS-80 MI/III audio.
You should check LF distortion without the capacitor. Curious if the capacitor itself is adding distortion.
Hi, how do you determine wich level of input set for the sweep analysis? hola, como determina con que nivel de entrada hacer los tests? que nivel de entrada usó para barrer en frecuencia? gracias
What kind of results do you get with that capacitor mod on the inverting input rather than going direct to ground?
1st kit i built was a Jaycar or dickswmith ½w amp kit made with one of these. In 1997.
i once made a wierd amp with that chip where i had to go above 12v so i used 16 orm speaker and it worked pretty much flawlesly even though i think 12v was not recomended while 16 with poor regulation wastotaly bonkers but it never blew up
Is a good idea to make a Wien bridge oscillator with this IC for the AF range (up to 20kH)? What would be the max frewuency it could generate?
Thx
Great video
Were you the one who made a video about 555 AM transmitter and a 555 singing are?
Yes, many years ago on my old channel deleted long ago.
@ I’m interested in those videos. More than that, the schematics. Do you still have them?
@@DextersAmplifierRepa I'd have to recreate that circuit as I don't have the videos or schematics anymore.
Is this chip good to work in a bridge?
By 4 ohms two chips parallel maybe will be better.
Hello John! Can you please do a video showing the equipment used to make these measurements? Big respect and cheers from Germany!
Search for Quant Asylum. I’ve had their analyser and dummy load for a number of years. Excellent low cost audio test equipment.
Couldn't you feed the output into a high power FET to increase the power gain relatively easily/
If using it for a preamp, driving 1k ohm?
Viva lm386 works also great for a small guitar amp with a Jfet in the first stage 😊
I tried several times and never managed to get any of my LM386s to work properly. I guess I just never put together the proper layout. Never had that many problems with other chips.
What is the difference between lm3886 vs lm386 ?
I use to think the LM386 was junk and was going to replace one with a TDA7052 which has a full bridge output and no output capacitor. I used the little amplifier in a bench test speaker that runs on a 9V battery. I found that the TDA7052 had more than double the quiescent current so I guess the LM386 wasn't so bad after all. You mentioned the TDA7267 and I looked up the quiescent current on that one... 20ma! Not so good for 9V battery operation.
Super Duper Happy New Year John😊
couldnt this be used as a headphone amp? why not do a 32ohm load?
hall i send you some mix2037? it's like lm386 but class-d, and unlike most other similar chips it is very good, claiming 0.02% distortion... I use it quite often and i like it.
I think you may have erred regarding the distortion at 20kHz. It looks to me like about 0.6% rather than the 0.11% that you stated (@ 7:50 in the video)
Some people like using this intentionally for their distortion in guitar pedals.
Indeed. I always thought of the 386 as a quick and dirty gain block. And if you're willing to exploit both inputs and/or the bypass pins, you'll ind a few more weird tricks.
It helped that for years, it was an off the shelf item at Radio Shack back when getting ICs of any kind was more of an ordeal for the DIY crowd.
@ ugh RadioShack being gone still makes me sick. We used to get diodes from there to trick map sensors on turbo cars to raise the boost past 14psi lol
Is it driving a real speaker?
I'd presume resistive test loads. Speakers do not keep a constant impedance vs. frequency and wouldn't give smooth test results.
I did in fact click right away. I like the LM386.
Good enough to drive the US Robotics Courier’s speaker 🤷🏻♂️
Now 3886
I cannot stand the LM386, unless drives an alarm-clock speaker. How this is still going and not the 4562 or at least the 2068 is beyond me.