BASS BOOSTER

The following schematic is for a bass booster. The booster is a modified Baxandall tone control with no bass cut and no treble control. Hey, it's a bass booster. It boosts frequencies from about 30Hz to 160Hz. It can boost by 14dB, so be careful.

It is heavily based on a design by Rod Elliott. The original can be found in his article "Audio Designs With Opamps - 2" on the Elliott Sound Products (ESP) site. This is a great site with lot's of really good information. I highly recommend it.

Notes

• The input cap can be replaced with a .01uf cap if you wish.
• The 10pf cap is optional and will start rolling off everything over 15kHz. 5pf will double this to 31kHz.
• The tone control requires a low impedence input. If you already have a low impedence input, the input buffer can be removed. However, the output is inverted.
• The opamp is not critical. A 4558 would be just fine.
• I do not show the parts for the +4.5 reference. Here is the +4.5 voltage divider I used.

Credits

• Rod Elliott for the basic tone control.
• Jack Orman for his basic buffers article among others.
• "We don't want any treble" from a t-shirt for sale at talkbass.com. And yes, I own one.

Links

• Here is another Frequency Booster. This one is non-inverting. I may have to try it out!

Contact Sean MacLennan
Last modified: Sat Apr 2 16:17:38 EST 2005