Introduction The main purpose of Signal Chain Explorer’s (SCE) is to quickly build a signal chain and explore how interferers degrade the signal to noise ratio. With that in mind, in this lesson we’ll build a simple signal chain and … Continue reading →
We’re starting a series of lessons on how to use Signal Chain Explorer. Links to these will be listed on this page. We’ll be adding an introductory lesson — Lesson 1 — shortly. Keep a look out for it. Lesson … Continue reading →
This is an updated version of a PDF document of the same name that’s distributed with both the SWE and SCE products. We now provide it in an online form, as given in this post. 1.0 Introduction A key and … Continue reading →
SCE Quick Tour When the first preview of Signal Chain Explorer (SCE) was released, we included a PDF “quick tour” document with the product, which is also available for download on this site. However, as the product has evolved, that … Continue reading →
In this article we investigate how thermal noise and thermal distortion play a part in the design of a phono audio signal chain. For our example, we’ll use a Shure M97XE cartridge, a 47K/200pF termination shunt, three gain stages of 10X … Continue reading →
As mentioned in the last post, we’ve been busy adding functionality to handle differential signal stages to Signal Chain Explorer. This stuff isn’t ready yet, but in the course of our work we uncovered a math error in one of … Continue reading →
We’ve been hard at work the past few months figuring out how to add differential signal stages to Signal Chain Explorer. An example of a signal chain using differential signals is given above. Here, we have a microphone or acoustic pickup signal … Continue reading →
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series on required sensor power we introduced you to the formulas needed to compute this power, and you got to see the formulas in action in Signal Chain Explorer. At the end of … Continue reading →
In Part 1 of this Short and Sweet article we introduced the concept of finding the minimum required power a sensor needs to deliver in order to achieve a desired signal quality for a given signal chain — that quality being … Continue reading →
New functionality was recently added to Signal Chain Explorer that computes the minimum sensor power required to achieve a desired SNR (or ENOB) for a particular signal chain. This feature was originally experimental, but it didn’t take us long to decide to include … Continue reading →