Manny Silverstein MMI 593 - Exam 1 Question 3 - Tube Screamer

The rst stage here is a common tube screamer circuit. The inputs are biased for the single 9V power supply, typical for guitar gear. For each tube stage given a plate voltage of 250V, I wanted to have the plate current of 3mA to keep it simple, which got me a plate resistor of about 83.3k. I got 2.5k using 1.75V as my biasing point (halfway between 0 and 3.5, the grid voltage where a 250V plate voltage intersects according to the 12AX7 chart). Using that value and a lowest frequency of about 81Hz (low E on a guitar) originally got me a degenerative feedback cap value of about 8F, though after some experimentation I found I was getting better results with a 10F capacitor, and none for the second tube stage (though the degenerative feedback does result in a lower gain than expected). I also included two extra pots in addition to the drive in the tube screamer circuit, which is an additional drive between the two tube stages and a volume out of the second tube stage. The nal piece of the circuit is a transformer-less unbalanced to balanced output taken out of the book.

Left: The frequency response for the output of this circuit.

Right: A close up of the values in the top corner. There is an overall gain of 61.7dB when all pots are turned up. The frequency response ranges from 54.5Hz to 5.6kHz, which is adequate for guitar gear.

Left: The harmonic distortion analysis for the circuit. Theres a total harmonic distortion here of 56%.

Right: The transient analysis of the output of this circuit. Square waves show intense distortion.