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MUSICALINSTRUMENTS AMPLIFIERS
Another important field of application for active
systemsis music.
In this area the use of several medium power
amplifiers is more convenient than a single high
power amplifier, and it is also more realiable.
A typical example (see Figure 21) consist of four
amplifiers each driving a low-cost, 12 inch loud-
speaker. This application can supply 80 to
160W
RMS
.
Figure 21 :
HighPower Active Box
for Musical Instrument
TRANSIENT INTERMODULATION DISTOR-
TION
(TIM)
Transient intermodulation distortion is an unfortu-
nate phenomen associated with negative-feed-
back amplifiers. When a feedback amplifier
receives an input signal which rises very steeply,
i.e.containshigh-frequencycomponents,thefeed-
back can arrive too late so that the amplifiers
overloads anda burstof intermodulationdistortion
will be produced as in Figure22. Since transients
occur frequentlyin music this obviouslya problem
for the designerof audio amplifiers. Unfortunately,
heavy negative feedbackis frequency used to re-
duce the total harmonic distortion of an amplifier,
which tends to aggravatethe transientintermodu-
lation (TIM situation. The best known method for
the measurement of TIM consists of feeding sine
waves superimposed onto square waves, into the
amplifier under test. The output spectrum is then
examined using a spectrum analyser and com-
paredto theinput.Thismethodsuffersfromserious
disadvantages: the accuracy is limited, the meas-
urement is a rather delicate operation and an ex-
pensive spectrum analyser is essential. A new
approach (see Technical Note 143) applied by
SGS-THOMSONtomonolithicamplifiersmeasure-
mentis fast cheap-itrequiresnothingmore sophis-
ticatedthanan oscilloscope- andsensitive- and it
can be useddown to the valuesas low as 0.002%
in highpower amplifiers.
Figure 22 :
OvershootPhenomenonin Feedback
Amplifiers
The ”inverting-sawtooh” method of measurement
is basedon theresponseof anamplifier toa20kHz
sawtoothwaveform.The amplifier has no difficulty
following the slow ramp but itcannot follow thefast
edge. The output will follow the upper line in Fig-
ure 23cutting oftheshadedarea andthusincreas-
ing themean level. If this outputsignal is filtered to
remove thesawtooth, directvoltageremainswhich
indicates the amountof TIM distortion, although it
is difficult to measure because it is indistinguish-
able from the DC offset of the amplifier. This prob-
lem is neatly avoided in the IS-TIM method by
periodically inverting the sawtooth waveform at a
low audiofrequencyas shown in Figure 24.
Figure 23 :
20kHz SawtoothWaveform
Figure 24 :
Inverting SawtoothWaveform
TDA2030A
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