Power supplies is one of the parts having the most important impact on
the overall quality of an amplifier, specially in the case of zero
feedback, single-ended ones. A low ondulation of output voltage and a
sufficient accuracy of its mean values is of course required, but
stability on current peaks, immunity to mains noise and low internal
impedance are of utmost importance too. It's quite difficult to
fulfill all these requirements and technically correct realisations
often turn to be subjectively awful. Practice is a crucial point in
this field : even a switching power supplie, altough very suspicious
in audio, can be of exceptional quality when designed by a specialist.
The aim of this article is to show how computations required in the
design of a complete power supply can be conducted using basic
characteristics of transformer, rectifier and load. Full treatment of
this problem is extremely difficult, and a close form solution cannot
generally be found; however, two limit cases encountered in allmost
all power supply design will be developped. It is useful to recall
again the dangers of building a high-voltage power supply without any
practice of that : please take advices from professionals or advanced
amateurs.