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Diagnosing distortions

This chapter focuses on the visual appearance of the distortion residuals produced by THD analysis. The distortion products may be low-order, in which case they appear simply as second or third harmonic, looking basically sinusoidal.

Crossover distortion, the greatest disturbance in the amplifier designer’s peace of mind, is instantly recognizable not only by its shape but by its timing, coinciding as it does with the zero-crossings of the output waveform. The other distortions are slightly harder to distinguish, as they all have their origin in contamination of the signal with half-wave rectified sinewaves, and so the different residuals look similar. Fortunately it usually takes only one or two simple experiments to determine ...

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