Devil's Staircase

May 31, 2019 82 Replies

The open-loop all-digital approach tends to produce less accurate output waveforms than DAC + class D amplifier.

If the power supply rails are not perfectly smooth, or if the propagation delays or rise and fall times or on-resistance of the output devices have some dependence on the output current, then you will get distortion, that can best be corrected with feedback.

The all-digital approach might be ok for a motor drive but you won't reach the kind of distortion performance that can be achieved by a class D amplifier that takes analogue feedback from the output terminals, e.g. these Hypex ones:

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I have now realised that this might not be true. There could be arbitrarily many turns on the isolation transformer after a shunt, though I still don't think it is a better solution.

Although I am no longer convinced of the inferiority of your solution, I would be surprised if there are not some small CTs available these days. As I replied to myself above, I no longer think the CT necessarily offers better linearity.

A possible advantage of the CT is that the manufacturer will expect it to be used like this, whereas the audio transformer manufacturer will not, so that the applications support and characterisation data available might be better for the CT.

Right, I knew that. Moving right along.... ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

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