Noisy Cricket amp ipod in? Possible?

[bigandtall]

I'm building a Noisy Cricket amp right now and I'm wondering if anyone has tried to make an iPod in on it for playing along through headphones.

Thanks for any input!

[bbmonster]

You could stick a mini mixer in front of the amp, that's what I did for my ruby. One input would be used for the guitar, then two others for the left and right channels of your mp3 player. You could get fancy by putting volume and panning pots instead of two separate volume pots for the left/right channels. Since it was one of the first few things I built, I just kept it simple with the two volume pots. I also stuck a buffer in front of the guitar input, but there are threads on here IIRC you can just up the value of pots to better match the impedance to avoid tone suck.  Oh and the mini mixer plans are for 4 inputs, and since I didn't want to deviate from the schematic, I stuck a metronome circuit on the last input. So what was once just a for fun project turned out to be a great little headphone practice amp.

[JKowalski]

Man, I posted here a while ago and my post dissapeared!

You just need a op-amp mixer, I assume that's what BB's "mini mixer" is.

You guys should look into how mixers like those work - they are incredibely simple circuits, and they are very useful circuit building blocks.

In BB's case, you should know that you don't need a certain number of inputs. You can just keep on adding channels, with each new channel having the same input resistor. The last input in your ruby could have been taken off with no change to the circuit.

But I have to admit, a metronome was a cool addition.  




PS you might want to consider doubling oe even tripling the size of the input resistors to the mixer for the ipod line in - this will half the volume of those inputs. I say this because MP3 player outputs a line level signal, much much higher then a typical guitar signal. You'd have to mess with them to get the right balance of volume for guitar and ipod.

[bbmonster]

Oh yeah good catch, the mini mixer is the one from ggg
http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/diagrams/mixer_sc.gif
I figured that was one of the easier ones to find many discussions in this forum if any trouble arises.

And yep, could've left off the 4th input, but at the time I was still new (and still a newb) and afraid of modifying a schem too much, so I just took them as building blocks and pieced together different complete schems hoping for the best.