I am building an audio amplifier with LM386 with a voltage supply of 5 V.
The input signal is 50-250 mV.
Can anybody tell me why there is a resistor and capacitor in series at the output?
As the value of this resistor is 10 ohms, will it draw some power from the speaker and decrease its loudness or I am pointing in wrong direction? Pardon me if you find this post irrelevant. I am just curious because I am integrating it in my design.
Can anybody tell me why there is a resistor and capacitor in series at the output?
It's called a Zobel network.
The LM386 (just like its predecessor the LM380) doesn't like to run into anything like a high impedance load on the output. If it does it will become pretty much unusable. So, if you look at the impedance that a normal speaker has, you'll see that at higher frequencies, the impedance rises.
This is due to the inductance of the speaker coil. Here's a nice picture that shows speaker impedance in blue and, the combined impedance of speaker and parallel Zobel network: -
Image taken from this site (theradioboard.com). But, it's only the higher frequencies where the LM386 becomes unstable so, at the naturally low mechanical resonance point of most speakers (shown with the peak in the blue line at the left), the LM386 is fine.
As the value of this resistor is 10 ohms, will it draw some power from the speaker and decrease its loudness or I am pointing in wrong direction?
Yes, it will consume power but, at low frequencies (say 500 Hz) the 0.05 μF capacitor has an impedance of 6366 Ω and nobody is going to be much worried by any current taken through the Zobel network. At 5 kHz, the capacitive reactance is clearly still a relatively large value (637 Ω) and still an unimportant factor.
Compare this with a relatively lower nominal impedance of a speaker at moderate/mid-range frequencies i.e. 8 Ω and, the small current in the Zobel network is fairly insignificant.
Given also that audio spectrums tend to follow a "pink-noise" profile, the amplitudes at the higher frequencies are significantly less than at lower frequencies. In summary, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a wasteful power argument against the Zobel network.
When closed loop amplifiers drive a capacitive load, it can cause resonant gain peaks or even instability/oscillations. You can find a lot about this with the terms "opamp capacitive drive", "capacitive drive compensation".
To "tame" this as Rohat points out, can be done in two basic ways: a) reduce the gain at the resonant frequency or b) damp the resonance by a resistive load.
The option (a) is the slightly more elegant approach but requires some calculation/sims and it often referred to as "in-the-loop-compensation". Option (b) either places a series resistor in line with the amplifier output (often undesired especially for high loads), or puts a large resistive load in parallel with the capacitive load. This is what is shown in your schematic. The capacitor in series prevents excessive DC current flow. It has to be large enough to make the RC load impedance look rather resistive at the resonant frequency.
However, in your circuit the 250µF coupling capacitor is not a capacitive load because it is in series with the speaker. I am not sure why such circuit would require the RC damping network, it can be probably to provide some insurance against unintended speaker resonances in the ultrasonic range.
