Building a different F5…

As I have mentioned a few times, the First Watt F5 is one of my favourite amplifier designs (and of course I am not the only one who likes it). It’s very simple to build, it’s reasonably priced and it sounds exceptionally good. The only drawbacks are the heat and the relatively low power (which is why I sold my original build), but with both new speakers and a new room comes new opportunities so I wanted to try the design again.

I actually have a few F5 clone boards more or less done, but that’s a story for another time because the original F5 design has spawned a few variations. One of them by diyaudio-user Juma is based on using several smaller output devices in the form of Toshiba 2SK2013/2SJ313 (which of course are obsolete…). For reasons I don’t really pretend to understand these devices are very linear and so the sound of this F5-version should be even more special – we’ll see about that I guess.

I’ve looked at this particular F5-design before and it’s not exactly new, but sometime you have to wait a (long) while for inspiration to strike and in this case it only did a few weeks ago, so the finished boards turned up only this week.

My version has four device pairs in the output to allow a bit more idle current for low-impedance loads. Also included is some additional rail capacitance close to the outputs (mostly because it seemed wasteful not to use the board space for anything), but otherwise it is that same as Jumas original circuit. I’ve only bench-tested it for now and I can’t do proper trimming of idle current and offset until I’ve drilled some heatsinks to mount the board on, but it powers up like an F5 and it responds to the trimpots, so hopefully it should adjust properly when the time comes. For now I’m just excited to have gotten it this far 😀