Friday, December 26, 2014

Simple cassette player amplifier


This circuit is a simple amplifier of the audio signal comming out directly from a magnetic head of a cassete player (like the ones used for cars, before the CD era). The design is focusing on simplicity and not on generating a high fidelity output, which is also depending on the quality of the cassette (tape). This amplifier differs from most audio amplifiers based on common opamps because it uses an LNA opamp (low noise amplifier), due to the fact the audio source has microvolt level (uV). Amplifying a uV voltage without adding internal noise is not an easy task. Note that the output of a microphone has a mV voltage level so it's easier to use common opamps for the amplification.