Noisy Cricket MkII

Runoffgroove and Beavis Audio have been great resources for the DIY audio community for a long time now, offering projects and guidance which has helped many people over the years, me included.  This is Dano’s take on a ROG project, a nifty little 0.5W amp that has a lot of fans out there, but with an added Bass switch for additional tone control.

Info from Beavis about the amp:

Here’s a fun Beavis Audio project that lots of people love: the noisy cricket guitar amp. I started with the runoffgroove.com ruby amp, and then added a tone control and a ‘grit’ mod. This is a great project that will give you a very sweet sounding practice amp based on the 386 lower power amp chip.

More information can be found on the Beavis Audio site here.

Added optional headphone output daughterboard.  Don’t forget to use a stereo socket for the headphone output and it will need to be a plastic body type socket, so the sleeve can be isolated from ground through the box:

And a switched headphone option.  An easier way of doing this would be to feed a switched headphone socket from the daughterboard, and the signal also going through the normally closed contact to the speaker output.  Then when a plug is in the headphone socket, the speaker will be diconnected automatically.

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