Speaker and a tiny amp

[vendettav]

hey everybody, so i'ev been working on a noisy cricket as some may know. and I'm actually done but the speaker i got was piece of crap so i got this other speaker. it's a car audio speaker and sounds a bit better but less loud and still it's not clean. the speaker i got before that was louder but was more mmm sandy (as if it was being overridden) but this one is 120 watts (!) and it still doesn't provide clarity.
I have these other speakers, cheap like big headphones, so when I plug them to the amp they are so much nicer and cleaner and overall loud as @#$%. I'm taking the car audio speaker back to the shop and getting replaced with something else. what shall I get, consider when getting something new?

lately all these builds were quite down on me and the whole life is down on me so dammit I hope to finish this and give it to the dude who's paying for the parts and whatnot. help guys! thanx

[jcgss77]

You will have distortion if the wattage rating of your speaker is much higher than your output from your amp.  If you don't know already, what you want in a speaker is a high sensitivity (or decibels, abbreviated dbl).  For the Noisy Cricket, you want a very low wattage speaker.  I have a link somewhere that has good prices for Jensen Mods...

Ok, without google, try amazon.com.  They have some pretty cheap ones, and lots of people who buy small fenders mod them with these speakers.  Hope that helps!

BTW-I just checked out your music-good stuff!  Is all your music instrumental?

[Quackzed]

i would look for a guitar speaker, 12" or maybee a 10".
i have a ruby amp that sounds pretty good with an 8-ohm 12" ibelieve 386 amps like to see 8ohms ...  several people reported buzzing tone with different speakers and not others , probably due to low ohm speaker...
its pretty convenient to just grab my little battery amp and go. loud enough to keep up with an acoustic. plenty loud really and not 'small' in tone by any means... enclosure size of mine is @16x14x7 or so... at least 14x 14 x 6 i'd think or itll sound 'boxy' in my opinion...
but even an old 12" woofer from some old 'stereo' speakers would probably be fine... though not an 'instrument speaker' at such a low wattage, you arent likely to damage the speaker...
so i'd say find an 8ohm 12" guitar speker or stereo woofer...

[Renegadrian]

ditch the 555 - go with a tda2822m - same package, no need to heatsink and a lot more (clean-ish) volume!!!

[Earthscum]

ditch the 555 - go with a tda2822m - same package, no need to heatsink and a lot more (clean-ish) volume!!!

You mean 386, lol... I was reading a 555 thread yesterday and kept thinking 386 the entire time.

I agree... I'm really digging the 2822's. Also, 2822's CAN drive 4Ohm speakers, like the car speaker you tried (my guess is that the car speaker's impedance is causing the distortion).

[deadastronaut]

ditch the 555 - go with a tda2822m - same package, no need to heatsink and a lot more (clean-ish) volume!!!

hi adriano, have you made a vero layout using the tda2822m ?..cheers rob.

edit . nevermind i found it in your gallery...and a stereo version too...cool. 

is it really nice and clean...?..what speaker would you recommend?..ive an old dr boogey unboxed i'd like to put in a portable battery amp
to annoy everyone with...

[Ben N]

You will have distortion if the wattage rating of your speaker is much higher than your output from your amp.

Ehh?    This seems contrary to intuition and experience (mine, anyway). Can you explain it?

[petemoore]

  Easier to think about when anything that moves is considered a fluid.
   Electrons, molecules..
  So..we want to move air, we'll call it water just to demonstrate experiments:
   put a popsickle stick in water, wiggle it back and forth, 3/4'', at a frequency of 4 CPS [cycles per second]...easy.
  Now grab a ping pong paddle and repeat experiment, if you reduce the excursion to 1/8'' or less it still takes more muscle power than doing 3/4'' excursion with the popsickle stick. Your body was the 'amplifier' and your brain was the 'source frequency' in the experiment, the popsickle stick and PPPaddle were the control items.
  Takes more power to move more air or water, and the driver/diaphram requires >stiffness=>weight, your body was like a big enough amp..at least for the popsickle stick. But when we try a third control element-diaphram, a boat oar, we can't even get 1/132'' excursion and the water barely moves.
  Getting better leverage on the boat oar...we employ large muscle groups of shoulder, back, and leg muscles [connecting the oar to the side of the boat was also a good idea many had, early on in independant boat experiments it became very common to attach the oar].
  So...now we wanna hooka lectric motor to move the oar back and forth...synomous essentially synonomous action to controlling the excursion of a speaker...back and forth...with enough force that the strokes are controlled.
  Controlled motoring requires an amplifier.
  Because it is merely an addendum affair [lucky you figurin' amps out when all it takes is a half buck coin sized chip !], we skip right to the power supply...
  Again with the fluid movement analogy...DC vessel holds the potential power.
  In this experiment, a Shot glass full of water = the 8v of constant DC pressure the 386 controls, compared to the 2 shots of water that =15vDC when the power supply is bumped up for a bigger buzz. The bartender only really poured 14v which is good [386 = 15v limit].
  The buzz is stronger when a power supply with greater pressure potential is connected to the motor controlling amplifier, buzz sounds louder.
  But still not loud or clear enough. Clear seems to be the buzzword around the lab, it is suggested that clear is synonomous with controlled, and the control factor is definitely related to how much pressure the power supply supplies before the voltage or current interferes with what the control amplifier demands. 
  So now we have 18v, and a better amplifier chip, and 2 nice, superfeatherweight 6'' speakers which don't require a whole lot of 'juice' to get air moving [effecient] and the sound is pretty good, very nice, approaching excellent but we're not sure.
  Then we go jam or the coffee grinder comes on and the surrounding noise interferes with the signal output of the speakers. They're not loud enough again, and when turned up, something in the system seems to have great difficulty when attempting to produce bass...it kind of sounds like the speaker cones are out of control.
  Hooking up 2x as many speakers [we're up to four 6''ers already] seems to help the system produce bass much better, the speakers don't 'rattle' now. But the amp is distorting, seen on scope the output it looks like huge spikes where it's following a smoothish input waveform...
  Next morning the shop has 42vdc power supply 3A of current available.
  The days tests prove that a 12'' with stiffer cone goes down to low enough frequencies for guitar, the cab-size to power available is much better than 2x6'' speakers [though maybe not as sweet] and the amplifier has no troubles driving the 12'' or the 2x6'' speaker alternatives.
  Sharts bass though, we used the 42vdc supply [just plain beats all the smaller ones, a bit peskier to build and noisier tho]...anyway...we decided the amp would be better for bass with 2x12''s, it was, and started clipping again tho.
  Since we had 3A to work with, we decided it'd be good to hook that up through 2 channels, and it turns out that more fluid' movement was detected as current supplied/current through the coils, and the 2x10'' speakers [we're widening the control elements..but the sound is really good now] have no troubles with guitar or bass.
  That is until we want to hit the pre-boost button for the bass guitar, but we're sure our informed laboratory fluid specialists will be able to get a controlled, long excursion movement which can be detected as low frequency air movement [bass sound] 2 miles away from the sound source.
  Started messin' with 'wavechannels' recently, these are able to direct the wave to dump out in a certain direction and seem to have the ability [when tuned to do so] of increasing wave amplitude [if you are in front of where it dumps out] to a large degree...this is nice because now we're able to get more bass from using a smaller cabinet. [we're thinking one of these systems on either side of the stage'd do it better though].
  But we went back to the basic large, stiff sealed enclosure.
  We had to go back to the blank drawing board again when we tried to wiggle any of the motor/driver systems to wiggle at 2 or more frequencies at a time.\
  We discovered it was hard for us to even wiggle a popsickle stick by hand at 4CPS and 1CPS [or any combination of 2 mixed frequencies] at the same time.
  So we divided the system in two, one for the slow motors, and one for the fast motors, and we're really getting better now [good thing since the drivers/crossover/amplifiers for this system have out budget crunchers working overtime].
  Turns out the slow [LF] motors are moving so much fluid back and forth [and it's a long travel cycle] that they're very heavy, and the amplifiers required to control them are also huge and heavy..at least compared to the fast [HF] motor system.
  Another thing about the slowmotors is they keep wanting to pop the coil out through the cone, or the coil starts slamming, or the cone distorts, we had to really beef up the cone, stiffen the suspension and since the coil was heavier to start with...they're not near as loud until massive wattage is applied to them. Otherwise they seem to get destroyed by heat [coil current makes 'em really hot].
  It works now, we found huge, powerful magnets for each driver, one is a big chunk of metal, the other is a coil of wire, through the wire we run huge currents in the form of of AC waves and it sounds like the source [a bass guitar string]. It meets the goal, it it now a 5 mile cop magnet, guaranteed to attract a cop from a 3 mile range [accoustic impedances may interfere with the effect].

[petemoore]

  In short you can  hook up different speakers:
  50 pound bass speaker [gonna take a mammoth amp to make this one blow].
  2oz. driver [can pop this one with 36v maybe].
  to a controlled voltage:
1.  An amplified source, some use guitar/amp with carefully not adjusted settings, others can use simple 9v battery to make very ballparkey seeming [however quite effective if seasoned at it] comparison tests between various speaker types. Quite a bit can be assessed about effeciency as related to frequency response and loudness.
2.  A 9v battery is handy because it connects right across a speaker terminal or 1/4'' plug.
  Having changed the control element [speaker] in the otherwise laboratory condition variables of 9v battery and no speaker cabinet, the loudness and frequency response reveals itself pretty well with a couple 9vdc 'clicks' trying to impersonate a square AC waveform.
  ...quick summary...tiny amp ? go for the loudest click you can get [try 2 speakers] out of the 9v while listening for a nice sharp start to the Click.

[Renegadrian]

ditch the 555 - go with a tda2822m - same package, no need to heatsink and a lot more (clean-ish) volume!!!

You mean 386, lol... I was reading a 555 thread yesterday and kept thinking 386 the entire time.

yeah! I meant 386, XD
Rob, I think any speaker will do, but a good sized one is better - I got a 8" ceiling speaker that works very good. When the ckt is fed by a 12V wall wart you got some clean sound, it just gets dirty when pushed at the max volume.
Nice and easy ckt, no heatsinking necessary, it's a 5 minutes build and it just blows any 386 (not 555 XD) away.

[deadastronaut]

cheers man!...

[vendettav]

some nice read actually! i got these speakers after testing out some. they are like car audio again but they've got a grill on them and whatnot and sound pretty clean. i guess i loved the sound of one only (i did wire them up together in series but didn't like it much, didn't try parallel)
these are also 4 ohms and it doesnt distort that way... 

anyways, ima take a look at the tda chip. if the rest of the circuit is the same i can just change that one: I'm using sockets for ICs and trannies

[jcgss77]

If you are still using the 386 amp, DON'T PARALLEL 2 4 OHM SPEAKERS!  The load will then be 2 ohms, and you will probably fry the chip.

[vendettav]

yeah that's what i read actually, thanx though cause i'd have forgotten about it haha