A long time ago, I built my own amplifier. This was a fun project, and the results were pretty decent. I never did post the results of the project, so here’s a picture of the results.

Obviously, I put a cover on there, and the end result looks fairly decent (a throwback to the 70s, when wood was commonplace on electronics).

On the front of this unit (not shown), I have a log potentiometer that served as the “preamplification stage” (basically, a volume control). Over the course of this amp’s life, this volume control would drive me absolutely bonkers because at about 10% of the volume level, the left speaker would shoot up to about 50% until you went down to 5% volume level.

I set up some speakers in the office recently, and decided to use the amplifier a little more. I realized quickly that I could just leave the amp playing at full volume, and simply control the audio level on my MOTU Traveler. This worked great.

So, this past weekend, I went to the “electronics lab” (basically, my basement) and decided to modify my amp a little more. I removed the connections to the volume control, and now the unit behaves more like a pure amplifier.

During this exercise, I reorganized a lot of the internal wiring, and decided that I should really separate this project into a power supply unit, and an amplifier unit. This would allow me to more easily experiment with other amplifier designs, and also a nicer (read: smaller) case layout.

I wish I had more time to play with these projects…