5/14/2020 2 stage transistor amplifier - BTEC Electronics

IAN LANG ELECTRONICS

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A Two-Stage Transistor Amplifier
These days it's very unlikely that you'll make an amplifier like this as the job has been simplified by
integrated circuits such as the LM386. However a transistor amplifier such as the one below has the
advantage that it can provide quite a big mouth, enough to drive a two-inch speaker at a reasonable
volume, using a low voltage; in fact I tested the one I made using one AA battery and it chugged along fine.
Now don't get me wrong, because I'm not promising a block-rocker here, but what it will do is provide an
audible output for anything that can work with a pair of walkman headphones; an i-Pad, a dictaphone, a
mobile phone, a small pocket radio or an MP3 player for example. It can also be used as a small portable
speaker for a computer. Here's a schematic for a testpiece, this can be improved and the final piece is
below the explanation:

max 2k2

Speaker is 8 ohms

So, those two stages I mentioned earlier are the two transistors, Q1 and Q2. They are bog-standard little
NPN transistors, and I used a pair of 2N3904s.

The first one is configured as a common emitter with a bypass capacitor, which is marked as C1. It's known
as common emitter because the emitter is in the ground path of both base and collector.
The base is biased by a potentiometer R1. It can often be difficult to find the load line of a transistor, and a
common technique is to use a 10k pot as a bias mechanism since it doesn't cost significantly more than
using two fixed resistors and gives a lot more leeway, the idea being you twiddle the pot round slowly until
you get the best response. You need to bias the base of the first transistor to get some amplification- the
output from the signal source alone won't be up to it. To the DC coming from the pot you add some varying
AC from the signal source, which is what the capacitor C3 is passing. This goes into the base as a varying
DC and varies the current and hence the voltage at the collector, which is that bit at the top attached to the
positive rail via a 10 ohm resistor.
At the emitter, which goes to ground, a 220 uF capacitor and a 10 ohm resistor are placed in series. The
resistor is there to give the emitter some bias, i.e force a current through from collector to emitter, and you
could in fact use a piece of wire and it would have the same effect. The capacitor you can't do without;
it effectively renders the emitter resistance to zero and thus the gain is dependent on the collector resistor.
The output from the collector is very high impedance, and so the next thing to do is to turn it into a low
impedance to match the 8 ohm speaker we want to put on the end. To do this we take the output from the
collector and feed it to the base of the second transistor (Q2) which is configured as an emitter follower. The
current through this transistor depends on the input to the base, and as the emitter is a low impedance
output the speaker matches and you get enough output to drive a speaker. C2 is optional. It will take down
the gain, but will add timbre to the output.

In the UK you can buy all of the components used above in any branch of Maplin for a couple of pounds.

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5/14/2020 2 stage transistor amplifier - BTEC Electronics

You'll see that the load resistor R3 is marked 10 ohms max 2k2. This depends on what you are plugging in.
I found in general that it's best to use a resistor of value about 560 ohms and omit C2.
It's also possible to run two speakers in series but NOT in parallel.(Too much strain on Q2 in parallel- it gets
HOT). This is the best, most general configuration I found across a range of devices:

560 R

The above configuration is much more satisfactory at 3V but not at 1.5V and costs slightly more. Because
the impedance of the transducer pair is now 16 ohms (2 x 8) it does away with the need for that capacitor
and puts less strain on Q2. The device sounds richer too, and having to use 3V instead of 1.5V is a small
price to pay for the improvement in quality it brings.

And that's about it for this little project. It shouldn't take long to build and is ideal for a Sunday afternoon
mess about or a school science project; if you want a switch then put it at one terminal or the other of the
battery. Here's another tip- oppose the speakers with the faces together to form an angle lesser than ninety
degrees. The sound waves tend to reinforce each other and it makes it sound quite mellow.

Ian Lang, December 2013

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