And the reason is not just the form-factor. In contrast to other, supposedly superior, amplifier chips, the LM386 is still manufactured after (who knows?!) how many years. And as the granddaddy of DIP-format amplifiers, it’s not going anywhere. Just kidding! The LM386 has its place - on the breadboard, in the one-off perfboarded circuit, or even free-formed with parts hanging off of it in mid-air. Maybe you’d like to point out your favorite grain-of-rice, few-hundred-milliwatt, 8 ohm speaker amplifier in the comments? Anyone want to buy a stick of LM386s off of our hands? Good, Basic Design
We’ve designed with the TPA321D, for instance, and it runs circles around the LM386, but it’s SMT. There are hundreds of few-hundred-milliwatt amplifiers out there that can outperform it. So for an SMT PCB design, the LM386 is dead. For instance, our other favorite DIP chip amp, the TDA7052, has been end-of-lifed. If you’re not down with SMT, you’re going to have to catch up soon. With the exception of making heat dissipation a bit difficult, we’re big fans of smaller parts and not having to drill holes in home-made PCBs.
This is a win on all fronts.īecause these amplifiers are marketed toward use in tiny devices, the vast majority are in surface-mount technology (SMT) packages. In particular, there are a number of chips that run in “bridge-tied-load” mode, which means that it drives both sides of the speaker, which makes it louder for a given voltage and removes the necessity for a big output capacitor in the design. These Guys Used To Walk the Earth Too via Nat’l Geo
There are some great amplifier chips out there running on 3.3 V and 5 V instead of 9 V or 12 V. Cellphones and lithium-ion batteries, along with the overall trend toward lower voltages in gizmos across the board, have pushed chip manufacturers to do more and more with less and less. There are a lot of better audio amplifier chips these days if you’re looking for lower voltages.
It’s not noise-free and doesn’t run on 3.3 V, but if you can fit a 9 V battery into your project and you need to push a moderate amount of sound out of a speaker, we’ll show you how to get the job done with an LM386. The LM386 is an old design, and requires a few supporting passive components to get its best performance, but it’s fundamentally solid. Truth be told, we have more than one chip of shame, but for audio amplification purposes, it’s the LM386. For Hackaday’s, that chip is the TIP120 transistor. Maybe it’s not what you would put into a design that you’re building more than a couple of, but for a quick and dirty lashup, it’s just the ticket. Everyone has a chip-of-shame: it’s the part that you know is suboptimal but you keep using it anyway because it just works well enough.
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