home made regulators

So we generally like the sound of the LM317. There is something to it's impuls that reproduces great musicality. We can confirm what Neil McBride writes about the possible replacement LT1086CT but for us that's a matter of taste then.

The following circuits are summarise possible regulators for our project. 

Single Regulator

Martin from acoustica describes the whole issue on his website/miscellanea/using 3-pin regulators, part 1...4 professionally. This is his "evolution" from the original datasheet to a nice version that introduces 2 LEDs (with a voltage drop of about 1V9) for the reference. This creates an approx. output of +5V. One LED would create approx. +3V3. 

Everything we need, very simple, home made.

Components: R1 240 ohm 0.6W metal film, Cs are tantal caps, C1 not necessary if close (10 cm) to reservoir cap.

Here's a layout for 2.5/2,54 stripboards  

Single Regulator w/ VBE filter

This circuit adds a filter (suggested by Teddy Pardo) before the regulator. It limits the output to 100 mA so it's no good for cpu or usb. 

A slight improvement for the +5V & +3V3 of the DAC.

Components: BC547C, R2 10 kohm 0.6W metal film, C4 3uf3/50V WIMA film 

This image shows 4 single regulators on the right and 2 with the booster on the left:

Tracking PreRegulator

This is acoustica's final regulator. If you want something better then you are heading towards the SuperTeddyReg. It's a question of budget - soldering is fun and a few parts more don't cost much. A few of our players run with four of these regulators.

The circuit above is designed for 5V AVDD. 

*C4 is not necessary if the load (DAC) is less than 150 mm away from the regulator 

Dual Stage Regulator

Neil McBride suggests 2 single regulators in a row. We built a slightly different version of it but didn't really test it circuit vs. circuit. Maybe we got stuck with all these LEDs glowing in different colors. 

Things to look at in the future ...

• ALWSR high performance audio voltage regulator by Andrew L. Weekes for AVDD

  • Pink Fish Media Flew Project to power master clocks