Dead Easy Dirt V2 – Reboot of my old design

Back in 2012, I put together the simplest circuit I could think of, which was a couple caps, a resistor or two, some diodes, and an LM386 amplifier IC. I left out everything that was 100% necessary for a functional circuit, including polarity protection, pulldown resistor, and power filtering. Lots of people built that simple circuit, so I thought I would update it a bit to include a few basic improvements that I had omitted from the original. The design owes a lot to the Big Daddy from RunoffGroove.

This one is perfect for breadboarding and experimenting. Try different diode types for D2 / D3, add a gain control via a pot between pins 1 and 8, change up the input and output caps, throw a simple boost in front, etc.

Also works great for building on perf or vero/strip board.

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