Electronics books

[Zirax]

I am seriously considering making my own headphone amp. However my detailed electronics ability lies back at GCSE level and just isn't upto the task. Soldering i'm fine with. Its come about as 1. It will keep me occupied 2. Its not house DIY 3. Its interesting and cool when it works.

Does anyone have any good starting points for general electronics guides/materials? If anyone is interested then the headphone site I got the idea from is
http://headwize.com/ubb/forums.php

The downside of the above site is that I went from a basic cmoy amp to a tube amp very very quickly

[Jonny69]

Crikey, I used to get all my circuits from the likes of Practical Everyday Electronics and the little books that Maplin used to do. I don't know where you'd get any of that stuff from any more.

Though I can help you with the circuits.

If you want a cheap 2x1W RMS amplifier for small speakers then use a TDA2822 IC. It's a stereo amp in an 8 pin chip. Kicks out nearer 5W if you push the voltage up to 15V but gets damn hot.

If you want quality then I recommend a single 2N3055 transistor on the output stage because you can get high quality versions of these for audio and they will be running completely unstressed in class A driving headphones. Use an op amp or a transistor to control the amplification, use an audio equivalent of the 741 to do this if you go the op amp route. First search on Google for 'audio grade op amp' comes up with the LM833 which I'm pretty sure I used on one of mine to invert audio signals to bridge power amps up. Should be able to come up with something with about 4-5 external components that will sound cool.

If you're using dual op amps you could be clever with tone controls, filters etc on the spare op amp.