Bypass and Chassis Grounds

[NateS]

During my oscilloscope shopping - I ran across this video on bypass capacitors and ground planes. It's about 5x longer than it needs to be, but it's still worth watching.

[Jazz P Bass]

Yeah!
Dave is like Steve Irwin for electronics.
He is great when it comes to explaining fundamentals.
My hat is off to him for him taking the time.

[Mick Bailey]

I can watch Dave all day long. His product reviews are entertaining and I always learn something from watching him. He seems to have unlimited enthusiasm for electronics and puts an enormous amount of time into his videos.

[NateS]

I'm so old I learned this from RG Keen and Tom Balon on usenet. But it was really cool to see it in action. And props to him for building a test circuit that shows it well.

I remember on my first amp - I'd done the Fender style doghouse to hold the filter caps. Then had this explained to me, and the next iteration was to star ground everything. I ended up with this massive ball of wires radiating out from a ground lug that was such an effective heat radiator that the only thing that would melt the solder was a massive stained glass window soldering iron. Next came learning to keep bypasses local, and look for things that cancel out (if two triode stages are in series - their relative impact on B+ is inverted from each other too.) Bypass a push pull stage as a unit (at least for bulk decoupling caps). Still run a ground wire for heavy current stages and noise sensitive stages.