no-cap bass fix

Joerg Reisenweber joerg at openmoko.org
Wed Mar 24 16:22:15 CET 2010


This is *STRONGLY DISCOURAGED* and will break quite a couple of things. 
Details see inline below

[Stefano Cavallari Di  23. März 2010]:
> Yesterday night I was going to fix the poor audio response of the 
Freerunner.
> Just before starting to solder (having opened the phone and the metallic 
> plate) I discovered the caps I got were the wrong ones.
> So I looked at the scheme for an alternative solution, and I decided to try 
to 
> replace the audio caps with 0R, thus losing DC blocking.

You're not only losing the DC-decoupling, you're also losing the negative half 
of the sine wave, when amp is basically shorting output to GND to create the 
negative current by discharging the coupling capacitor. See operation 
principles of analog bridge amp outputs in some good book about electronics. 
This is NOT a class-A amp 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_amplifier#Class_A ), means it never 
opens both the pullup and pulldown transistor concurrently. The LM4853 is a 
class-B push-pull bridge.


> The plan was to measure the DC component and if low enough, leave it as it.
> If not, putting the DC filter in the minijack adapter.

This is basically feasible, but will most surely break JACK_INSERT logic, by 
applying a voltage >0V to the GPIO detecting if a jack is inserted or not.
Each time you enable the amp to output some sound the headphones, it will 
latch up and not detect jack removal. And it's quite unlikely jack insertion 
is correctly detected each time as well, there also might be both false 
positives and false negatives.


> So I did that, and it seem to work. I tried first with a multimeter. It 
reads 
> 0.2 V DC, but I have to confirm it with an oscilloscope.

This reading probably is with headset amp disabled. Correct reading should be 
Vmid, i.e. ~1.6V


> I tried the audio with very cheap headphones first (I was afraid of burning 
> them), 

Chances are you actually will end up with broken headset speakers, just 
because of this


> then with decent ones. It seems to work way better!
> Now I just need a better adapter cable (mine need to be inserted middle way, 
> it's not the right one), and then I have usable audio :)


Don't you think, if this was a viable workaround for the problem, we at OM 
(particularly me in this case) came up with this suggestion some 1.5 .. 2 
years ago?


cheers
jOERG
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