Op-Amp Power Supply Quality Considerations Page 1

Op-Amp Power Supply Quality Considerations

Introduction
Op-amps use a DC supply voltage, typically anywhere from a few volts on up to 30 V or more. If the power supply is a perfect
DC voltage source (that is, it gives the same voltage no matter what happens), the op-amps output would be solely governed
by its inputs. Since there are no ideal voltage sources in the real world, you have to worry about the power supplys quality if
you want the best performance from an op-amp. This article will describe the faults of common power systems with a focus on
how they affect op-amp audio applications.

Batteries
Batteries are close to ideal voltage sources, provided that you stay within their design limits.

First, some terminology. Cells are the 1.5 V or 1.2 V units that make up a battery; a battery is multiple cells in series. Its
incorrect to call an AA cell a battery. When I use the term battery below, I am either referring to a self-contained unit like a 9
V battery (composed of 6-8 cells, depending on the type), or several AA or AAA type cells in series.

The primary parameter to be concerned about is the impedance of the cells you will be using. An ideal voltage source has zero
impedance, so it can put out any amount of current and the voltage wouldnt change; it could put infinite current into a 0
load. A practical storage cell cannot put out infinite current, so its effective impedance must be greater than zero. The higher
the impedance, the faster the cell temperature and voltage ripple rises as you increase the current across that impedance.

The impedance of a storage cell rises as the cell discharges. The greater the physical size of the cell, the lower the initial
impedance due to higher surface area, so the higher the current you can draw from it while still keeping temperature and
voltage ripple low. But beware, impedance adds in series, so the impedance of an 8-cell battery pack will be eight times higher
than that of the cells that comprise it.

Lets look a practical example. Well say your battery pack is made of 12 alkaline AAA cells in series. The initial impedance of
each cell is about 0.2 , so the packs impedance will be about 2.5 . Lets say this battery pack is powering a headphone
amplifier that is driving 0.5 VAC into 32 headphones. Ohms Law tells us that the pack will put out about 39 mV of ripple
when that variable current is drawn from it. That value will roughly triple by the end of the cells lifetime. This approaches the
amount of ripple youd get from a cheap commercial unregulated power supply, and its a lot worse than for a good regulated
supply. The moral of this story isnt that AAA cells are a bad choice for powering headphone amps, just that going with small
cells and putting many in series has a downside. After all, many people happily use a pair of 9 V alkalines in series to power
their headphone amps, with an initial impedance of about 3 .

The effective impedance of rechargeable NiCd and NiMH cells is much lower than for alkalines. Its on the order of tens of
milliohms across the cells run time. Lets say you have 18 cells in series and at the end of their charge theyre up to 50 m
each. Thats 0.9 total, so in the previous example (0.5 V into 32 ) the worst-case ripple would be about 14 mV. During most
of the cells' run time, the ripple would be about half that value.

If you put two batteries in parallel, the packs impedance is divided in half. They can either serve higher current demands with
the same amount of ripple, or they can serve a given current level with lower ripple than a single battery.

For op-amp audio applications, the load-modulated ripple problem is not critical, because it means that the power rails will
fluctuate with the music, which affects the music but its complementary to it. The effect is a flabbier sound, and an increase
in stereo crosstalk. Contrast a constant 120 Hz ripple like you get from some wall power supplies: this will add a constant
120 Hz undertone to the music, which is far more audible. Removing load-modulated ripple is a noble goal because it will
improve the sound, but its something you shouldnt worry about as much as other sources of audio faults.

Unregulated Wall Power Supplies

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To get DC power from wall power (AC), the simplest solution is the unregulated power supply. Heres how they work:

1. 120 VAC input

Transformer
2.
(6:1 turns ratio)

3. 20 VAC

The first stage of a typical unregulated AC to DC wall power supply is to reduce wall voltage (120 VAC in North America) to the
desired lower voltage level. To reduce 120 VAC to 20 VAC as in this example, you would use a 6:1 transformer.

4. Bridge Rectifier
5. Pulsating DC

The next step is to convert the lowered AC voltage to DC with a bridge rectifier. This is just an arrangement of diodes which
flips all of the negative swings of the AC waveform so that you get a pulsating DC waveform.

6. Smoothing Circuit
7. Smoothed DC

We want a flat DC voltage level, so the next step is to smooth the pulsating DC out. In the simplest type of unregulated DC
power supplies, the smoothing circuit is just a large capacitor. This results in a flatter waveform, but there is still some
variation; this is called ripple. To reduce ripple, you can use bigger and better capacitors, and add other filtering components
like inductors.

Heres the ripple component from a typical unregulated power supply:

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As you can see, there is nearly 400 mV of ripple on this power supply, a Creek OBH-1. (The test was done at full load.) The
high ripple voltage is a result of this supplys small physical size: the case only has room inside for a small filtering capacitor.

Problems With Unregulated Power Supplies

The first problem is that theres a practical limit on how much you can reduce the ripple voltage. Unregulated supplies are used
whenever small size and/or low cost are the primary design goals. Therefore, the filter cap ends up being on the small side, so
all practical unregulated supplies put out a significant amount of ripple.

The other main problem is that an unregulated power supply simply puts out an analog of the AC input voltage as DC: any
variation on the AC side is directly translated into DC variation. Lets say youre using the 120 VAC to 20 VDC power supply
depicted above, and that theres a brownout that drops the wall voltage to 108 VAC. Because the transformer puts out 1/6 the
input voltage no matter what that is, the power supply will put out 18 V as long as the brownout lasts. The same sort of thing
happens if your wall power has hash or voltage spikes on it: the ugliness appears on the power supplys output, albeit in a
reduced form.

These DC artifacts are collectively called noise and ripple, often abbreviated N+R.

Part of a Solution: Regulation

Given that the AC wall voltage varies so much, electrical engineers came up with the idea of power supply regulation. This
means the DC output voltage is mostly independent of the AC input voltage. One regulated power supply I have is rated to put
out a stable DC voltage given anywhere from 108-132 VAC, a 22% variation. An unregulated power supply would simply vary its
output by 22% given the same supply range.

There are two kinds of regulation: linear and switch-mode.

Linear Regulated Power Supplies

Most linear power supplies are simply an unregulated power supply followed by some kind of linear regulator. The most
common linear regulators are monolithic regulators, being a regulator circuit on a single chip. Occasionally you see linear
regulators made of discrete circuitry.

A linear regulator is designed to put out a particular voltage given an input voltage within a fairly wide range. For example, the
standard 7815 monolithic regulator is designed to put out 15 VDC given anywhere from 17.5 to 30 V as input. The difference
between the minimum input voltage and the output voltage is called the dropout voltage. When the input voltage is below the
dropout point, the regulator doesnt regulate the voltage. When the input is above the dropout point, the regulator works. The
voltage dropped across the regulator is turned into heat.

Linear power supplies arent perfect. Some noise and ripple still gets through the regulator, and regulators will add some noise
of their own. Here are some measured numbers of various linear supplies under a constant 0.25 A load:

Power supply description N+R

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Elpac WM080 1.8 mV

Creek OBH-2 0.25 mV

High-quality LM317-based DIY supply 0.06 mV

Switch-Mode Regulated Power Supplies

The other kind of regulation is switch-mode. These kinds of power supplies are variously called switch-mode power supplies
(SMPS), switchers, or switching power supplies.

Lets say you want 15 VDC and the wall supply voltage has sagged to 100 VAC. If you simply turn the power on and off very
rapidly so that its only on 15% of the time, you get 15 V on average. That gives a choppy waveform, but it isnt difficult to
smooth that out. If the wall voltage goes up to 120 VAC, the swticher simply limits its on time to 12.5% so that the output
remains at 15 V. (This is greatly simplified. Real switchers are more complicated.)

The advantages of a switcher are that its very efficient, it can be made physically smaller than a linear power supply, it puts out
less heat, and it can operate over a much wider range of input voltages than a linear power supply.

The disadvantages of a switcher are that the switching component adds quite a bit of noise to the output power. Ive seen many
different switching frequency signatures. The better switchers have all of their noise up in the megahertz range, so that theres
virtually no noise in the audio band. More commonly the switching frequency is up in the tens of kHz with some sub-
harmonics extending into the audio band, plus possibly also some low-frequency ripple. Then there are the really cheap
switchers, with a switching frequency right in the middle of the audio band.

Heres the noise I saw on a Phihong PSA18U-180 switcher under an 0.25 A load:

The top image is the main switching frequency, at about 1.3 MHz. This is one of the faster swtiching speeds youll see. Below it
is the low frequency noise. The main ripple you see is about 3 Hz, and the jaggy stuff on on top of that is the 38 Hz noise that
the scope measured.

Does Any of This Matter?

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After looking at the scary switcher noise graph above, you might immediately swear to only use linear power supplies and
NiMH batteries forever more. But its premature to make such a decision without first deciding whether that noise actually
matters. To do that, you must understand the application.

Consider a simple op-amp based headphone amplifier, like the CMoy pocket amplifier. This circuit has a single op-amp per
channel doing the amplification. Noise and ripple (N+R) on the power supply affects an op-amps output, so op-amp
manufacturers publish Power Supply Rejection Ratio (PSRR) ratings for their chips. Heres a typical PSRR graph:

OPA2132 PSRR graph

(You can ignore the common mode rejection part of the graph. It isnt pertinent to this discussion.)

As you can see, PSRR is dependent on frequency, and in the case of the OPA2132 the V+ and V- pins reject noise differently.
Consider the +PSR curve on the graph: at low frequencies, its about 104 dB. So, the 6.7 mV low-frequency noise we measured
above is reduced by a factor of about 158,000 (104 dB) to 0.04 V at the output of the op-amp. If your amps gain was 10 and
the full-scale signal to the headphones was 0.5 V, this noise would be -121 dB below full scale. Completely negligible.

As for the HF noise shown above, thats so far above the audio band that it, too is negligible.

Now, consider the Creek OBH-1 unregulated supply above. Would this be a good supply for a CMoy amp? Sadly, no. Ripple
rejection is about 100 dB at 120 Hz with the OPA2132, and the noise level was 383 mV. If our full-scale signal is 0.5 V an the
gain is 10, the noise appears at the op-amps output as -82 dB. Thats audible. (In case youre wondering, this supply works
okay with the Creek OBH-11 headphone amp because that amp has a linear regulator inside.)

Conclusion
Does power quality matter? Certainly. Should you avoid unregulated power supplies for op-amp audio? Yes, unless you add
external regulation. Are batteries and linear power supplies the only suitable power sources, then? Well, no. Modern switching
power supplies have ultrasonic switching frequencies, and a good switcher will have low ripple as well. True, this is not
technically ideal, but in practice this noise doesnt usually affect sound quality for low-gain amplifiers.

As for ripple, you can sometimes get away with constant low frequency ripple if your op-amp has a high PSRR rating at the
ripple frequency. But in my opinion, power supply ripple is worth spending time and money to avoid. Induced ripple due to
current demands is also worth getting rid of, but its not nearly as big a concern as noise and constant ripple.

This article is copyright 2002-2016 by Warren Young, all rights reserved.

Updated Sun Jan 18 2015 04:24 MST Go back to Audiologica Go to my home page

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