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Reading feedback /square wave results

nerdorama

AK member
Subscriber
I've been working on a little console lamp and had very rounded leading edges on 10 kilohertz square waves. I increased the feedback a bit and adjusted the parallel capacitor and ended up with this. What does this wiggle on the leading Edge tell me? Regardless, the amp sounds a lot clearer and better to me. The100Hz square wave is flatter, more horizontal, with the increased feedback too.
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It means there is a little bit of supersonic ringing in the transformer. Looks to be in the 75k to 100k frequency range.

The ringing seems to go on for several cycles before being damped out. Ideally you would like to dampen that ringing after one cycle.

What is the frequency response of the amplifier in this condition? You might have some room to tune out that ring and still have a decent frequency response range.
 
Not sure of the frequency response at this point. When I got this amp it had a very soft rounded leading edge on the 10k square wave and the amp sounded rolled off. I'm just experimenting to see if I can improve it. I lowered the feedback resistor from 1500 ohms to just under 1k and the parallel cap was originally 1000p. I now have 140p. Regardless of the wiggles, I think it sounds better. The treble is clearer and bass it tighter and cleaner as well. I'll have to read the Arta manual and make some response measurements. I have only used it for speaker work so far.

BTW, this is a small Ravenswood ECL86 PP console amp I recently got on BT from @RWood. It's a cutie.
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Thanks,
John
 
Wouldn't you want to use some sort of bandwidth limited/low pass filtered square wave for this sort of thing, rather than feeding it something that we'd (or at least I'd) not really expect it to produce or deal with playing music?
 
Wouldn't you want to use some sort of bandwidth limited/low pass filtered square wave for this sort of thing, rather than feeding it something that we'd (or at least I'd) not really expect it to produce or deal with playing music?

No, because amps can oscillate at super-sonic frequencies, affecting the quality of the audible bandwidth and possibly damaging the amp and/or speakers. You need to know what's going on across the full bandwidth of the device.
 
right, thats the idea of square wave tests, it shows potential instability beyond the useful range by feeding it nasty harmonics to see what it does with them. If the results are bad, you do stuff to limit the bandwidth of the amplifier to keep that under control.
 
No, because amps can oscillate at super-sonic frequencies, affecting the quality of the audible bandwidth and possibly damaging the amp and/or speakers. You need to know what's going on across the full bandwidth of the device.

You can check for that separately from tuning, yes?
 
You can check for that separately from tuning, yes?

Not sure what you mean, but the purpose of "tuning" an amplfier for best square wave response is not only to achieve the best frequency response, but also to ensure stability at all frequencies and reduce as much possible the chances of the amp going into oscillation at some point. The two go hand in hand. The problem is that with real world speakers, the load on the amplifier can vary significantly, sometimes approaching no load at all. By ensuring stability at all frequencies, the chances of the amp freaking out under no-load conditions is considerably reduced.
 
The point is why tune feedback using signal that contains harmonics into the hundreds of kHz and higher when, at least in this case, I would suspect the bandwidth of the OPTs aren't remotely capable anything near that.

Or, in other words, use a low pass filter commensurate to a realistic performance expectation.

If, after you get the wave looking best you can with that, pull the low pass and check for oscillation when you blast it the full spectrum of high fr. harmonics that a 10kHz squarewave has.
 
The point is why tune feedback using signal that contains harmonics into the hundreds of kHz and higher when, at least in this case, I would suspect the bandwidth of the OPTs aren't remotely capable anything near that.

Or, in other words, use a low pass filter commensurate to a realistic performance expectation.

If, after you get the wave looking best you can with that, pull the low pass and check for oscillation when you blast it the full spectrum of high fr. harmonics that a 10kHz squarewave has.

Yes, I understand your point, but the fact is that in a high-feedback design, an OPT with limited bandwidth can actually lead to *more* problems rather than fewer, creating phase shifts at the frequency extremes that could break into oscillation. Again, it's a compromise between getting the best performance out of the amp and ensuring stability. There's no point testing for one without testing for the other.

If you limit the bandwidth for tuning purposes, then remove the limit for testing, you're likely to run into oscillation anyway, since high-feedback designs are prone to do that. So what would be the point? Like I said, you need to optimize the amp for best performance *and* stability at the same time.
 
...

If you limit the bandwidth for tuning purposes, then remove the limit for testing, you're likely to run into oscillation anyway, since high-feedback designs are prone to do that. So what would be the point? Like I said, you need to optimize the amp for best performance *and* stability at the same time.

Well, I don't know. I was presuming not to presume, hence the question/point.

At this point I'm not convinced those two, best performance and stability are one and the same.

I guess I just have to do my own experimentation and draw a conclusion from that, or at least for that instance/use case.
 
Well, I think I have made some progress. I changed the cap value in the VA series RC plate load attenuator. Now have this. Haven't a stability test yet but it seems better. First pic is 10k, second is 1k. These seem a lot closer to the behavior of the Dave G. Magnavox SE 8600 amp I built before Xmas.

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At this point I'm not convinced those two, best performance and stability are one and the same.

They aren't necessarily. I've had amps that I could make absolutely stable, or I could make produce really nice square waves, but not both at the same time. I compromised in the direction of stability. I do have one pair of amps that the only way I can make it stable is to make it produce absolutely terrible frequency response, so I made the best compromise I could for usable audio bandwidth and stability. Under very specific conditions that will probably, but not definitely, not occur it will get funny but its flat from 30-22khz. To get it absolutely stable it fell off a cliff after about 5khz.
 
The point is why tune feedback using signal that contains harmonics into the hundreds of kHz and higher when, at least in this case, I would suspect the bandwidth of the OPTs aren't remotely capable anything near that.

The "Too Long; Didn't read" answer:

The bandwidth of the amplifier, even a lesser pedigreed one like the one being discussed on this thread, does have bandwidth that exceeds its published "flat response" specs. That, with the combination of applying global feedback creates conditions in which the amplifier may oscillate at certain frequencies, under certain speaker loads. It is for this reason that it's important to test stability/frequency response of the amplifier at frequencies well below and above the "flat" response the amp is capable of producing.

On the other hand if the amplfier had no feedback whatsoever, it would not (generally) be possible for it to oscillate. So it is primarily because of feedback that these things need to be tested.

===

The very long (and boring?) answer:

If the stages encompassing the feedback loop include R/C or L/C couplings, then as the signal passes through those couplings, the signal becomes phase shifted. It's not a constant phase shift, rather it's more pronounced at certain frequencies, typically at the frequency extremes. It's important to note that ALL feedback signals are phase shifted at some level IF the loop includes R/C or L/C couplings.

In traditional global feedback push pull amplifiers, a portion of the (phase shifted) output signal is feed back to the input of the amplifier where it is subtracted from the input signal (hence the name "negative" feedback). The idea is that under normal operating conditions, the feedback signal is essentially an "error" signal--a measure of the "error" the amplifier is producing relative to its input signal. Thus feedback, when correctly applied, by and large corrects the amplifier's faults and tries to produce that perfect output signal, which is the input signal, just amplified.

All this is well and good, and works beautifully, except for one small problem. What if there is so much phase shift in the feedback signal (relative to the input signal) that the feedback signal is no longer an "error" correcting signal but an "error" producing signal? That occurs when the feedback signal is phase shifted by 180 degrees or more (relative to the input signal). When this occurs you have conditions for an oscillating amplifier. Even if the amplifier only has flat response between 20 Hz and 20 KHz, it's still possible for the amplifier to oscillate at 2x, 3x, 4x of the lowest OR highest frequency the amplifier is capable of producing with no loss.

To address the problem, you "tune" the amplifier to essentially force the closed loop gain of the amplifier to be less than unity at frequencies where the phase shift exceeds 180 degrees, thus forcing the amplifier to not oscillate at those frequencies.

So, in summary, this is why it's important to test the amplifier with a signal that contains lots of harmonics above the 20 Khz region to ensure that it doesn't oscillate at those frequencies. You also do essentially the same type of test at very low frequencies to ensure the amplifier doesn't oscillate at those low frequencies.

If you don't test for this, it's possible the amp will oscillate on it's own under normal operating conditions (but only if it has feedback applied). And you don't want your test bed environment to be your expensive speakers!
 
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My thoughts were a low pass filter well above the normal audio range, yet not a "wide open" 10kHz square wave. Such as 3x the expected "flat" bandwidth of the amp.

When I get around to it, and it could be a while, that's what I'm going to play with.
 
On a related note, I’ve read in a couple posts that square wave testing should be done “quickly.” I recently had a 2kHz squarewave going through a Fisher 500c for at least 45 min and my OT started to get hot and I had an output tube redplate on me. What’s the “rule” to do squarewave testing safely, as far as level and length of time you can keep it going through?
 
Well, I think I have made some progress.
That looks very promising. Very next thing I'd do is measure frequency response.

But generally I think there is still a little too much overshoot on the leading edge, so you may want to experiment with increasing the shelf network cap just a smidge, or replacing (temporarily) the shelf network resistor with a potentiometer, and adjust the pot until you get the response you want, then measure the pot and replace it with a fixed resistor of that size.
 
On a related note, I’ve read in a couple posts that square wave testing should be done “quickly.” I recently had a 2kHz squarewave going through a Fisher 500c for at least 45 min and my OT started to get hot and I had an output tube redplate on me. What’s the “rule” to do squarewave testing safely, as far as level and length of time you can keep it going through?
This type of square wave testing is usually done at 1 watt output, so at that wattage output you could leave the amp on for days at a time with no issues.

I wouldn't do full power square wave testing for more than a minute or two at a time, personally.
 
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