MOSFET


Anyone else prefer metal oxide silicon field effect transistor based amplifiers? Why?
byegolly
There is no perfect device. Mosfets output stages are:

- more robust than transistors
- have higher bandwidth
- are more tolerant of difficult loads

but are:

- less efficient since have lower voltage swing from the same supply voltage
- are more nonlinear than transistors around cutoff region
- require more gain in preceding stages to eliminate crossover distortions
- limited ability to apply local feedback (low gain)

My experience with different types of amps is very limited but judging by reviews and opinions there are good and bad amps in each category.

The only area where Mosfets win hands down are class D amps but this is different type of Mosfets (vertical vs lateral) specifically designed for switching.
To continue and correcting Kijanki, especially nowdays, bipolar transistors are substantially higher quality than a couple of decades ago. Hence most of advantages/disadvantages of bipolar transistors vs. MOSFETs disappear (especially for audio applications) such as
- higher bandwidth(no need to go onto MHz ranges I believe)
- more tolerant of difficult loads (never had been more tolerant than bipolar transistors that have substantially lower output impedance with common emitter connection)

Therefore the preference to MOSFET based power amplifier could only be for older vintage models.
They are tools, nothing more or less, some of my favorite amps have them, some do not. The GamuT amps , which I have been considering, have only one pair of transistors a channel, I don't know of any bipolars that can do this for 200 watts a channel. So circuit simplification remains an advantage for them.
"no need to go onto MHz ranges I believe"

In general, to keep things stable output stage should be as fast as possible (little phase shift)and input stage as slow as possible (large phase margin). Power output transistors of modern amplifiers have hundreds of MHz bandwidth (even though slower devices are available). Also smalls signal bandwidth is different (much higher) from large signal bandwidth. We need to keep total amp's bandwidth as high as possible to avoid phase shift in the pass-band. Jeff Rowland uses 180MHz opamps (OPA1632) in Capri preamp. I have impression, so far, that he knows what he is doing.
So that's what it means?! I never knew...and I used to own one, two actually, my old Moscode 300's...I loved em way back when. I used to laugh at the reviewers back then who always went on about the mosfet mist...