Power Supplies — Nelson Pass / 2001

Lots of people don't understand electricity, but they do understand plumbing. Hydraulics provides a good analogy in understanding basic electrical flow. Wire is a pipe. Water pressure is voltage. Water flow is electrical current. Lakes and storage tanks are capacitors. Diodes are one-way valves. Tubes and transistors are faucets. The entire power circuitry of an amplifier can be seen as a community water system. The sun, driving the weather cycle, deposits water on the landscape, and it collects in a lake behind a dam. The community draws water as needed through pipes. In the winter, the rain collects in the… More...

Zen Variations 7 — Nelson Pass / 2004

One of the performance issues raised by the original Son of Zen (Audio Electronics, #2, 1997) was its efficiency figure, which was charitably described as 4% (500 watts in, 20 watts out). You may recall that this was dictated by the original requirements - no feedback, no capacitors in the signal path, and a single gain stage. Zen Variation 6 relaxed the requirements on feedback and capacitors in order to provide a tutorial exercise about “super-symmetric” feedback. The performance was improved in distortion and output impedance, but the efficiency was only slightly improved, largely because we used most of the… More...