So I searched around for other amps and stumbled upon the TPA6021A4 manufactured by Texas Instruments. What I liked about it is that it comes in an DIP package so I could just breadboard it. So I tried it out and to my surprise, it sounds really awesome. My design is extremely simple, is louder and the sound it generates is really crisp. All you need is two capacitors (0.47uF electrolytic) and a TPA6021A4 integrated circuit.
Some things to note, the circuit runs off only 5V. Pin 7 must be attached to the ground of your input signal, not the power supply (I think all 3.5mm jacks have a left, right and ground. That's the ground I'm talking about.) Also, you don't actually need a 0.47uF. I think any capacitor close to 0.47uF would do. In fact, I didn't have an 0.47uF capacitors, so I just hooked up a 3.3uF and a 1.0uF in series to get 0.77uF which is close enough. And finally in the schematic, Pin 18 is for controlling the volume. I just hooked it up to 5V for maximum volume, but you could place a 100K pot to control the volume.
The TPA6021A4 is about double the price of an LM386 (Digikey), but the TPA6021 supports stereo audio. To hook up another speaker, you would only need attach another capacitor to pin 4, tie pin 3 to high, tie pin 5 to the input signal ground and pins 2 and 20 to your right speaker.
If you want to build this amplifier, tell me how it goes.
