Experimenting with the BBA3FE…

Not the most obvious acronym to decode, but it stands for “Balanced Burning Amp 3 Front-End” and it’s the first half of a power amp design that Nelson Pass launched for the ”Burning Amp” festival several years ago. It’s very closely related to the F5 circuit and without the accompanying power stages it’s also well-suited for pre-amp duty. The diyaudio store has been selling PCBs for years, but I’ve never been sufficiently interested to grab one (and the shipping cost and import duty for buying PCBs from the US makes it really expensive to get anyway).

Now, fast forward to a few months ago: For a while I’ve looked for a “real” balanced preamplifier circuit. I have several balanced designs already, but some of them are “cheating” by not being developed for balanced use and that obviously won’t do 😉 I’ve looked at the BA-3 before, but some months ago I did a double-take when I noticed a schematic for a balanced version in this thread (and yes, I know the thread is seven years old…). That circuit was more or less what I was looking for, namely a simple discrete circuit optimised for balanced use, and so I decided to try to make one.

My version is more or less the same as the original, but I decided to save some board space (and create some flexibility) by moving the output capacitors off-board and so they are not shown (but still very much required). The major downside of the circuit is that the input is based on 2SK170/2SJ74 JFETs that are obsolete and near-impossible to get. To add insult to injury, they should ideally be matched to around 8mA Idss which is more or less the most commonly required value – and therefore even harder to find!. However, the article also states that while matching is preferred, it is not essential, and so I managed to find some suitable pairs in my parts drawers.

I’ve only briefly tested the boards and they power up fine but the DC-offset is unstable so the output capacitors are definitely needed. Thermal stability and equilibrium with the bias-current is also something I need to work on (it’s going to require leaving the boards on for a while as far as I can see), but so far it is looking promising. As regular blog-followers will know I am a big fan of the B1 design and I don’t normally need gain, but as there are several reports of the BBA3FE sounding significantly better than the B1 I am obviously quite excited to make progress on this build.

PCB files will be coming eventually, but I made a couple of stupid mistakes in this layout that need to be corrected, and since I was so focused on this being a balanced pre I forgot to make it easy to do the SE-version as well. Translation: I really need to get a v1.1 ready and ordered first 🙂