Neha Patil (Editor)

OCL amplifier

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An OCL amplifier (output capacitor-less amplifier) is any audio amplifier with direct-coupled capacitorless output. Typically, OCL amplifiers can be any of several amplifier classes, and typically have a push-pull output stage.

Advantages of OCL amplifiers over capacitor-coupled amplifiers include

  • Avoiding the cost and bulk of an output capacitor
  • better immunity to motorboat oscillation
  • larger output power at very low frequencies and DC

    • Disadvantages of OCL amplifiers include

  • larger power dissipation and passing DC through the load, in the minority of designs with poorly controlled DC bias point
  • increased sensitivity of the output DC bias point to process variations, although the last disadvantage is less important for older bipolar processes.

    • Implementations

  • LM4910 by National Semiconductor
  • Discrete-element 100 Watt OCL amplifier
  • High Fidelity 300 Watt OCL amplifier
  • Lab tutorial on OCL amplifier from Hong Kong Polytechnic University

    • References

    OCL amplifier Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA