Customer Reviews

Beginner's Guide to Tube Audio Design

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good book for the beginner interested in push-pull tube amplifiers. My only beef would be the very short treatment Single Ended amps are given. For the beginner, the SE typology has the great advantage of simplicity. For me, that outweighs the problems of low power (built my own high efficiency speakers) and expensive transformers. But even after building a kit SET amp, this book helped a great deal with knowledge on how to modify it. And in the field of electronics, the more times you read material from a different perspective, the better.

The only books I have read that are better for beginners are the old Rider series (Basic Electricity and Basic Electronics), which are, alas, long out of print.

This book is concise and contains much useful information but is not adequate in and of itself to understand how to effectively design tube audio gear.Bruce goes into some detail regarding feedback and stability but without previous experience the reader will be somewhat at a loss to get results.It also does not explain the whys and wherefores of "modern" tube audio practice as they differ from traditional goals and methodologies.

I do recommend this book,but must caution the reader against expecting too much from it.The Germans (Reiner zur Linde) and Japanese (Asano,Shishido et al)ar far ahead of anything published in English to date and until the US press "catches up" or someone translates these works,I think the would-be tube designer would do well to concentrate on literature from the mainstream tube period.

This short book covers construction of tube audio equipment for beginners. I like to build tube audio-it's definitely more homebrew friendly than solid state and often sounds better-but I think one should have a better electronics background before starting these projects than Rozenblit presupposes. I think absolute beginners should start with the bookwork first and then build simple projects such as regenerative receivers with FET's before moving to tubes and then line powered audio gear.

This is a reasonably good but not really comprehensive book, best picked up after you can solder, use test equipment-you cannot build or troubleshoot without a generator and some kind of oscilloscope as well as an AC voltmeter accurate to .1 dB from 20 Hz to at least 30 or 40 kHz, and people who tell you otherwise are misguided or lying-and follow schematics pretty well.

This is a note to previous reviewer "mrogerc" (St. Paul, MN USA). The old Rider series ARE now in print. Details:

Basic Solid State Electronics
ISBN: 0790610426

Basic Electricity
ISBN: 0790610418

This book is meant for the absolute beginner, and it's where I started. I now have many books on vaccuum tube electronics and I can't think of a better way to be introduced to the subject. It covers subjects like safety, chassis construction and has a few projects in the back. One thing to mention, though. If you want a book full of projects, buy Bruce's other book, Audio Reality. The projects there are of higher performance and more up to date.

My main nitpick is the resource section in the back. I'll just come out and say it: they're ads. There's nothing wrong with that, but a lot of the companies are out of business. Someone that's interested in this subject will likely be able to find resources on the internet. I suppose it was more useful when the book was written.

the book is very good about telling you how to design tube amplifiers, The in's and out's of the whole thing, it even gives schematic diagrams for amplifiers and allso where to get the parts that you need to build one. it is probley the only book of it's kind.