Tag: Tube Amp Posts

I’ve made a few posts about the little tube amp project I’m probably going to tackle in the fall, but decided to put the entries on its own blog, as I want it to be a single glimpse into a big design and build process. If you want to follow along, subscribe to the feed over at tubeamp.posterous.com. It’ll probably only be an entry every week or so for the next few months as I debate things in my head, but I’m hoping to be in a position to build something in the fall or early winter.

Back when I was about 20 years old, a friend of mine living in the same building at UBC as me ending up building a little do-it-yourself audio tube amplifier for home. It was one of the coolest looking devices I have ever seen, and made me really want to try putting something like that together. When most people think of vacuum tubes, then think of outdated technology from the 60s that was generally inferior and not long lasting. That was typically true of a lot of audio applications back in the day unfortunately. That said, while the vacuum tube has mostly been replaced by the transistor, there are still many applications that make use of vacuum tubes, such as high end audio, especially in guitar amplifiers. From a purely mathematical point of view, vacuum tubes produce a great deal of distortion when compared to transistors. What the math fails […]