[sdiy] Death of DIY?

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Monday 18 July 2005 11:43 pm, harrybissell wrote:
> It might use more discrete parts, but usually it just means that you have
> a bipolar 4.5V supply that sucks your  battery down, and a lot more
> interstage coupling capacitors.  You can re-do almost all the circuits with
> bipolar supplies a lot easier, and with more headroom.

I think you misunderstand -- when I'm talking about signal processing using 
more discretes I'm not talking about using any op amps at all,  therefore no 
bipolar design is needed.  A supply can be real simple,  whether it's one of 
those gel batteries sitting behind me (I'm not exactly looking for major 
portability here :-) or a transformer-bridge-cap combo.  Yeah,  if you want 
to do the traditional synth stuff and have tight voltage control and so forth 
then you need regulated bipolar supplies.  I'm trying to take things to a 
simpler level here.

> I've done the BigMuff II (pi) in bipolar and it works better imho.  So do
> most phaser circuits etc.

I'm not familiar with that one and most phaser circuits I can remember seeing 
included a bunch of op amps...

> Signal processing wise... stompbox and synthmodules are interchangable...
> signal levels are higher in the synth modules..

Yeah,  "headroom"...

> Personally I'd rather have a 'real' ground and not have to use as many
> coupling caps (decoupling caps I like :^).   This can be a bigger issue in
> a bigger system. Most stompboxes run on their OWN 9V battery, so a large
> unit might end up costing more to run than a synth.

I don't see a problem with coupling caps offhand.  <shrug>