What the heck are "zobel" circuits?


I recently bought a pair of Classe 15 Amps from a gentlemen in Toronto. He was a great guy, but a bit of a fanatic. He heavily modified these amps - one mod was to get rid of the 'zobel' circuits at the speaker binding posts. As a safety prcaution, he gave me a pair of 'outboard' circuits to be attached via Banana plugs in the back of my amps. He explained that they prevented runaway high impedance that could oscillate the amps. I noticed that Alpha-Core speakers are now offering what the call an RC circuit built into their speaker cables, that I believe effective obtains the same results. Can anybody further enlighten me?
dbamac

Showing 1 response by clueless

As said above , the impedance of a driver will show a peak at resonance, and then a slow rise from the nominal impedance with increasing frequency. A Zobel network typically consists of a series network of a capacitor and a resistor connected in parallel with the woofer. The purpose of the Zobel network is to cancel the rise in impedance which is caused by the driver's voice coil impedance. In effect, the voice coil impedance is resonated out using a capacitor.

Here are a couple short online articles that do a decent job with impedance graphs and pictures of a typical simple zobel circuit. Sometimes they help.

http://www.trueaudio.com/st_zobel.htm

http://www.loudspeakers101.com/ZoblFilt.htm

Sincerely
I remain