Category: 3. Audio & Music

The oscillator shown in Figure1 is frequently used in digital circuits and may, therefore, look very familiar. Many readers may not know that this type of oscillator suffers from a nasty draw-back caused by noise. When the amplitude of the noise is higher than the hysteresis of the gates used for the oscillator, spurious switching pulses are…

Electric guitars use coils (guitarists call them pickups or elements) to convert the vibrations of the strings into an electrical signal. Usually, a guitar has more than one element builtin, so that the musician can select with a switch which element or elements are used to generate the signal. Because of the differences in construction…

The circuit described here can create three different ‘US-style’ siren sounds: police, ambulance and fire engine. The desired sound can be selected using switch S1. The circuit can be used in toys (such as model vehicles), as part of an alarm system, and in many other applications. For use in a toy, a BC337 is…

If a transistor junction operating in Zener breakdown is used as a noise source, the amplitude of the noise signal is asymmetric. This problem can be solved by using two transistors as two independent noise sources. One of these has a series resistor to earth, and the other has a series resistor to the supply…

We have already published designs that use a transistor junction operating in Zener breakdown as a noise source. Anyone who has experimented with a reverse-biased transistor knows that the amplitude of the noise voltage generated in this manner is strongly dependent on the supply voltage. The variation between individual transistors is also rather large. An…