Hey guys, on a recent visit to visit my wife’s family, I realized that two of my nieces don’t have decent (or any) tunes available. They both live in apartments in NYC and are just starting out. Rather than design/build something from scratch Eileen said why don’t you give them one of the small radios you’ve built? Smart wife, right?

So I got my MIND-65 radio all fixed up and ready to hand off, but the other one, I’ve reworked a bit so it will have battery power and not need to be taken apart to charge the batteries each time.
Here is a thread on that radio: https://techtalk.parts-express.com/f...etooth-speaker
It’s the light colored one. Anyway, I had three smaller batteries in there to get me my 12’ish volts, but wanted to rework it to be able to just charge the batteries in place, so I purchased a 2x18650 battery holder with a charger/over-under-protect circuit as well as a booster to 12v all in one. Pretty slick, and fairly inexpensive at Ali, since PE doesn’t carry this. Also, it's nice being able to charge this with 5v. (It pays to save any and all power supplies from any old electronic equipment)
It really works well and just fits perfect in the center of the radio, but I noticed that when pushing the volume to louder levels, it makes a weird ‘click’ type of sound when the bass hits usually. I suspect it's clipping I'm hearing -- It’s at a pretty loud level when this happens, and I can get to about (going from memory) about 90% of the undistorted volume available with this setup using the booster board – compared to using the batteries alone with the previous setup.
I believe this is happening due to the power booster circuit not being able to deliver the needed amperage to the amplifier on the power-hungry sections of music. I’m pretty sure 3RUTU5 has has similar issues with some of his ‘converter’ type of boards he’s used. To clarify, when I used three of the smaller Lion batteries I didn’t have this problem.
I’m happy with the sound and performance as-is, and I’m sure my niece will be as well, but it’s got me thinking to myself. Would a capacitor wired inline with the positive terminal to the amp add any benefit to stabilizing the voltage on the high-demand portions? And if so, what value?
Here is a pic of the booster board and amp (from PE)… I have an extra of both to goof around with to test this out if it’s feasible.
So what do you think, would a cap possibly help?
Thanks for any ideas…
TomZ
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