Rave in a Briefcase

As part of preparations for a local party, I am building a sound system to fit in a small suitcase and run on 12V DC. The system consists of a small DJ mixing deck and a car audio amplifier. Powering the car amp is easy, as it was designed to take 12V DC power. Powering the mixing deck is not so easy.

Mixers are audio gear, so they tend to have audio signals that are AC, and have components above and below 0V. As a result, they have double-ended power supplies. For the mixer I have, there is an 18V AC power brick, which gets rectified, filtered, and put through a +15V regulator and a -15v regulator. 15, being higher than 12, is an inconvenient number of volts to get out of a 12V battery. Since it’s double-ended, I really need a voltage spread of 30V, with a 0V rail in the middle.

The simple, stupid way to do this is to power the rig with two 12V batteries and two 6V batteries. Across each set of one 6V and one 12V, I would have 18V, and if each of the pairs of batteries shared a common ground, that would be my 0V rail. Unfortunately, I’d also have to manage charging, connecting, and monitoring charge on all of those batteries, not to mention carrying them to wherever I was using the audio. Lead-acid batteries are heavy. Since this is inelegant, heavy, and requires lots of fiddling, I’m going to call it “Plan C” and only do it if everything else fails.

Another simple solution is to use a 12V DC to 120V AC inverter. That takes up a lot of space, and isn’t all that efficient, but it means I don’t have to build a replacement power supply for the amplifier. I have all the parts for it, and it requires less hauling and fiddling than Plan C, but it is still inefficient, so this is “Plan B”.

Since the AC wall wart is rated for 300mA, I have an upper bound on what the mixer can draw. That means I can start looking into DC/DC converters. Vicor makes a 12V to 15V converter, but it costs $99 dollars and I would need two of them. Since I don’t need a lot of current, I can probably make a pair of step-up converters that have a 15-18V output. This site has a simple schematic, and more importantly, the equation for the output voltage, given the current and frequency of a switching circuit in the converter. The control IC takes care of monitoring the output voltage and varying the frequency, but I may be able to use a simpler circuit and change the frequency by splitting off part of the output voltage and feeding it back to the RC timer circuit.The whole circuit would be small, and probably more efficient than using an inverter and the power supply of the mixer.