Starting DIY Tube Amps, basic info

[tunghaichuan***]

Duhvoodooman asked me for some sites to help with learning about DIY tube amp building. Off the top of my head, these are a few good ones I came up with:

http://www.aikenamps.com/TechInfo_2.htm

Aiken really knows his stuff and makes great sounding amplifiers.

Download these chapters:

http://www.pacificrecone.com/JackDarrBook.html

They are a good introductory explanation of the parts of a vacuum tube amp. The book was written before FX loops, high gain preamps, and channel switching circuits were used in guitar amps, but for the basics Jack Darr's book can't be beat.

You can buy a reprint of the book here:

http://www.audioxpress.com/bksprods/products/bkaa69.htm

The pdf chapters contain only the first half of the book excluding the schematics. The reprint has the schematics section. Most of them are available on the net, but some are rare. It is also nice to have a bound set of the schematics. That way you can refer to them.

I would encourage anyone interested to buy a copy of the reprint. I put my money where my mouth is and bought the reprint even though I own an original 4th ed. of Jack Darr's book. The reprint is published by Old Colony Sound who also publish many vacuum tube related books, most of which are hifi related. However, they've been keeping DIY tube audio alive for over 30 years and deserve the support of DIY guitar amp builders.

If you want to go whole hog, check out this resource:

http://www.pmillett.com/tecnical_books_online.htm

Lots of scanned manuals from the golden age of tube amps. It would take several decades to learn all that info, but there are a couple of introductory texts as well.

In addition, there are several BBS sites devoted to DIY amp building:

http://www.sewatt.com/ Single ended amp discussion, Champs, Valve Juniors, etc.

http://www.ppwatt.com/ Push pull amp discussion. 5E3, 60's Princeton Reverbs & Deluxe Reverbs, etc.

http://www.18watt.com/ Discussion of the Marshall 18 watt circuit and its variations.

http://www.ax84.com/bbs Discussion of homebrew amps, various SE and PP projects under the AX84.com banner.

http://www.ssguitar.com/ Solid state guitar amps only discussion.

There are a few more as well.

Tung