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#12
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Need Louder Sound
On 17/07/2019 12:05 AM, Paul wrote:
~misfit~ wrote: On 16/07/2019 3:14 PM, Paul wrote: ~misfit~ wrote: On 16/07/2019 10:38 AM, Paul wrote: wrote: I want to learn some Chinese, but find these old ears cannot hear the audio very well at https://chinesecharacteraday.com/one-word-a-day/ at least. All I have is an old set of earphones plugged to audio on a W10 PC. Even at max audio.Â* The phones have no volume control of course. I want to buy something cheap to make the volume higher.Â* Thinking of buying a new set of earphones with an amplifier, or just the latter to add to what I've got.Â* Or maybe USB instead? What do you think? Wei There is a *lot* of crap on the market. Take those NE5532 products for $15. Without additional transistors and a crafted output stage, and good VCC supply, you can't get ear-blistering sound levels. Another product I saw for $36, one commenter said "it's not loud enough". Which means the circuit is probably only driving about 1VRMS into 32 ohms. Stereophile amps of that sort, start at nice round numbers like $199.00 for the "beginner amp", and going up in increments of hundreds. This is obviously not the way to get an amplifier. I'm sure there is plenty of level on those. The audio industry is just as crooked as it was fifty years ago. You can find kits to assemble, for conventional amplifiers, but they expect a speaker load of 4 ohms or 8 ohms, and that's not a good match for 32 ohm headphones. I use a 40W bridged Canakit for my Test Machine audio output, which works OK. But it just isn't the right beast for headphones. The signal would probably still be a bit on the weak side. While the amp is 40W (2x20W), in actual usage into 8 ohm speakers, the output is just 2W per channel. And fortunately, with a tuned port speaker, this is good enough. I got a kit for a headphone amp that runs off a micro USB power supply (so can be pocketed and powered from a 'powerbank') from Aliexpress for about US$5 complete with a case but haven't assembled it yet. Is it just a 1V output ? Or is it one of the ones with much higher output ? A simple OpAmp can manage a pretty good swing, but will likely go into current limit with a 32 ohm load. I'm not sure where I put the kit and when I go to my purchase history I can find the purchase but the page doesn't exist anymore (which could be a problem if I need reference pics when I make the kit - lesson learned, any other kits I buy I'll download the pics). It was very similar to this one, same 'brand' but USB powered https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32723001937.html This one requires 12 - 18V DC input. So OpAmp, and I remember the blurb saying they're socketed so that the end user can change to different / better OpAmps if they want to. I thought the OP might be interested as a cheap solution toÂ* their problem. There might be an OpAmp with better power output. The ones I've used in the past, run out of steam at around 25mA or so. It's probably related to how much heat the tiny 8 pin DIP can handle. In the feedback section of that page there's a post where a guy talks about what other OpAmps can be used. When you place a push-pull stage after the OpAmp, that's when it gets interesting. You can do Class A (power wasting, but no crossover distortion), or Class AB (where as the signal goes through zero, one transistor is switching off while the other transistor comes on, and it's a bit non-linear). Yep. I'm a hobbyist audiophreak. I've built a few kit amps and re-purposed / rehoused / re-powered a few amplifier modules. I still like the sound of my amp which uses Hitachi J50 / K135 MOSFETs (two of each per channel) best. To get ear-splitting volume, you need a good voltage swing. One powered with +5V, could use a boost converter to achieve higher voltages, but not at the $5 price point. Designs running off 12 to 18 volts would have more options in terms of driving 32 ohm headphones. Which is probably the reason they discontinued the 5V version I have. If you scroll down the page to the Q&A there's someone asking if they still have it. The OP doesn't want ear-splitting volume, just a boost to make spoken-word audio clearer and a bit louder. I bought mine because I picked up an old pair of Akai ASE-30 2-way headphones at a thrift shop and found that a phone / pocket audio player doesn't drive them very well. That said they've been put away for a while now, which is why I didn't assemble the kit I bought. -- Shaun. "Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification in the DSM" David Melville This is not an email and hasn't been checked for viruses by any half-arsed self-promoting software. |
#13
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Need Louder Sound
On 16/07/2019 9:23 AM, wrote:
I want to learn some Chinese, but find these old ears cannot hear the audio very well at https://chinesecharacteraday.com/one-word-a-day/ at least. All I have is an old set of earphones plugged to audio on a W10 PC. Even at max audio. The phones have no volume control of course. I want to buy something cheap to make the volume higher. Thinking of buying a new set of earphones with an amplifier, or just the latter to add to what I've got. Or maybe USB instead? What do you think? Wei Another thing to consider is maybe there's an 'app' installed on your PC that controls the audio and is hidden away. A friend of mine with a high-quality stereo with big floor-standing speakers bought a new Dell PC and when she plugged it into the audio out socket found that her songs sounded thin and certainly not 'hifi'. At first I thought it might just be down to cheap'n'nasty audio circuits and told her so over the phone. However when I had a look in person I found an app tucked away in Windows 10's menu called Dell Audio that had many many settings including bass boost and an equaliser that had defaulted to 'headphones' output. Once we changed it to 'speakers / large / stereo' and turned off the bass boost and EQ junk it now plays her FLAC files just as well as her old PC did. -- Shaun. "Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification in the DSM" David Melville This is not an email and hasn't been checked for viruses by any half-arsed self-promoting software. |
#14
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Need Louder Sound
~misfit~ wrote:
On 16/07/2019 9:23 AM, wrote: I want to learn some Chinese, but find these old ears cannot hear the audio very well at https://chinesecharacteraday.com/one-word-a-day/ at least. All I have is an old set of earphones plugged to audio on a W10 PC. Even at max audio. The phones have no volume control of course. I want to buy something cheap to make the volume higher. Thinking of buying a new set of earphones with an amplifier, or just the latter to add to what I've got. Or maybe USB instead? What do you think? Wei Another thing to consider is maybe there's an 'app' installed on your PC that controls the audio and is hidden away. A friend of mine with a high-quality stereo with big floor-standing speakers bought a new Dell PC and when she plugged it into the audio out socket found that her songs sounded thin and certainly not 'hifi'. At first I thought it might just be down to cheap'n'nasty audio circuits and told her so over the phone. However when I had a look in person I found an app tucked away in Windows 10's menu called Dell Audio that had many many settings including bass boost and an equaliser that had defaulted to 'headphones' output. Once we changed it to 'speakers / large / stereo' and turned off the bass boost and EQ junk it now plays her FLAC files just as well as her old PC did. You raise a good point. But my problem is, the solution is a bit too techie for the average user to be interested in. I like to run Audacity, put a sine wave on the output, and see if I can get a signal on the LineOut that is around 1VRMS or so. As proof "nothing is holding back the output". I've had some mis-adjustments in the past, where only a fraction of the correct voltage appears. And using the multimeter on AC volts, I worked on the sliders and stuff until I got full amplitude like is supposed to be there. The other complication, is audio chips with 32 ohm drivers, where they won't switch the driver on, and they are using 600 ohm drive. There used to be a Zalman 5.1 headset where it really needed six channels of 32 ohm drive, and the audio chip would only give two. Some later HDaudio, the driver would allow four channels to drive 32 ohms (the "feature" was intended to allow two people to plug in headphones). Which still isn't enough to drive the Zalman headphones without an external amp. There have also been some sound products, where a raw DAC output is presented. With a very high output impedance, expecting a damn good preamp to be connected to it. Well, you can imagine how many customers haven't a clue what all that gibberish is all about. Even if I could find a user who knows what a multimeter is, not many people have the little black cable with the two male 1/8" plugs on either end. That's the cable I use for checking LineOut voltage. You can also connect Lineout from one computer, to LineIn on a second computer, and use the second computer to "record" the signal. In Audacity, you could then determine the voltage received. But now you have two computers to calibrate, instead of just one :-) ******* Computer sound sliders, generally have more extensive attenuation capability, than gain capability. Making it harder to take a really weak playback signal, and bring it up to full output. People have probably already noticed the problem with Hollywood DVDs being recorded at something like -15dBm. I never did find an explanation of how that's a good idea. Especially in some scenarios where the audio is carried on a digital path (over HDMI), and the sound knob on the computer cannot be used to bump up the level. Only the device receiving the signal can bump up the level (on decoding it). Computer audio is filled with perils. One other peril you might like, is the computer audio that "samples at 192KHz", the reconstruction filter is no where near being set at the Nyquist frequency, and is actually quite a bit lower. Which negates any benefit the 192KHz rate might have had. (That's only important if you are using your sound card as an oscilloscope.) Paul |
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