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Comment by vichu | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much when it comes to audio amp design, but this reminds me greatly of the O2 headphone amp[0] - that anecdotally a few of my friends have soldered for their personal use.

[0] http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/07/o2-headphone-amp.html

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I thought of the same thing. Both are inexpensive, straightforward, no-BS projects that leverage the advances made in electronics over the years to deliver quality audio.

If I made one of these, I 'd be tempted to put an ODAC and O2 board in the same chassis to have a complete amplifier.

> If I made one of these, I 'd be tempted to put an ODAC and O2 board in the same chassis to have a complete amplifier.

Such a product is available commercially:

> https://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/objective2-odac-combo-re...

Hearing the ODAC name is quite a throw back! I remember reading NwAvGuy's blog when I first started getting into headphones. I always wondered what happened to him.

Given the way he suddenly went to radio silence, I just assumed he was hired by Apple...

O2 is great and it is quite simple to build. There is even simpler amp called CMoy[1] which is simple enough to be first project for somebody just starting out.

I would start by taking look on some oss version[2] and order PCB from OSH Park[3]. I've built this version few years ago and it works well.

[1] https://tangentsoft.net/audio/cmoy/ [2] https://github.com/akafugu/cmoy [3] https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/dRKK4dgN

I built the cmoy. It was easy. But I know nothing about how it works, and I remember reading warnings on associated web pages like "this is not a guitar amp" etc. I'm curious to know a little more about how these (amps generally) work, why they're seemingly non trivial to design at a reasonable quality level etc.

Guitar amps are very different beasts. If you want to build something simple there is "1 watt guitar amp" project[1] with many different variations.

[1] https://www.electrosmash.com/1wamp

Yeah thanks but it's not that I want to build a guitar amp; I'd just like to read a little about the difference between guitar and headphone amps, different design decisions for headphone amps generally, things like that.

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