Today when I got home from work I decided I wanted to build myself a little boombox. I've been looking at small Bluetooth speakers and "boomboxes", if you will, for a while now. I did some scavenging through my parts drawer, and stumbled upon an old Toshiba TA7230P IC. I looked up its datasheet and decided it would be perfect for my needs. The TA7230P is designed to power a small set of speakers with minimal external components. If I remember correctly, I got it out of a junked radio several years ago.
The example circuit from the datasheet (pictured at the top) is what I ended up building. All that I needed other than the chip was several capacitors and a pair of speakers, all of which I already had available to me. I decided that I would go with point-to-point soldering to put it all together; both as an experiment for testing my soldering skills and as a way of keeping noise to a minimum. My end result is what you see below.
I was really impressed with the sound of the circuit, especially considering every single part I used was scavenged from old boards. The sound quality was cleaner than I had expected, and there was little to no detectable distortion at reasonably loud volumes. Overall, I powered the circuit off of 6 volts, which is on the low end of the possible 5.5-20 volts that the IC can run on. I used the circuit to power a small pair of 4 ohm, 3 watt speakers. My next steps are to find a good case for it all, and to interface the circuit with my Bluetooth audio adapter. I'll be saving that for another day though.
I built one with the same IC. It had hissing noise on the breadboard, but I am going to build it on a circuit board. I took it out of a Toshiba VCR. I plan on using it as an amp to help Direct Inject audio into my Cobra 2000 GTL.
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