Customer Reviews

How to Service Your Own Tube Amp: A Complete Guide for the Curious Musician

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

 

 

This is a great book that describes how a tube amplifier works in very easy-to-understand terms and in sufficient detail that you will feel confident working with your tube amplifier. An excellent emphasis on safety pervades the book. Very helpful algorithms for diagnosing and treating common and not-so-common amplifier problems are also included. Procedures for biasing an amplifier are not as detailed as I'd like, and this is why I can't give it 5 stars. Nevertheless, if you just get one tube amplifer book, I'd get this one.

For the person with little or no electronics background, and an interest in tube amps, this book is an excellent place to start. Basic electricity and magnetic theory are explained thoroughly. Individual components within an amp are described, and their function within circuits is explained. It includes troubleshooting flow charts to help isolate problems, and testing procedures for many parts. Also included is handy reference material (tube pin charts and voltage charts) for many tubes and common amplifiers. The book is not perfect, but it is VERY good, and by far the most complete book I've seen for beginners. So... if you're looking for a place to start learning about electronics, and tube amps, this is the book you want.

Being a tube amp fan who knows nothing about the technical details, I find Tom Mitchell's book very easy to follow. Not that I want to solder a tube amp myself, I just want to know what are inside a tube amp. I have read a couple of other books on the subject and also on speaker design. Of the other books, I am only able to understand about 50% to 60% of the content. But this book - I would say 90%. To someone who is armed with high school knowledge of physics and maths, I am extremely pleased. Now I know what are resistors, caps, the structure of tubes, the function and structure of a transformer and even how a speaker cabinet is constructed. What I would have wanted are more illustrations - drawings or photos showing how a signal travels from the source to the speaker. Who knows - I may someday solder an SE tube amp - possibly after retirement!

There is very little useful information for any musician in this book. Now im a mechanic so i have a very good grasp of basic electrics and im not thrown off by the more advanced concepts so its not that i found the book hard to understand. Its just that the information is presented in a way that has nothing to do with understanding what makes amps musical or unmusical. For instance, you will get a detailed description of,say, a tone control circut with resistance and capacitance values and what the circut looks like and does and how it can be changed but it says nothing of the actual effect of modifying the capacitance, for instance, could give you more high end definition or how to change a resistor to get more "jangle" or a million other possible mods. Tube types are listed and pin configurations listed but theres absolutely no mention of the high gain nature of 12ax7 tubes or how changing to a 12at7 will give you less gain or the differences of changing your V1,V2, etc. positions and how they would interact. What i was looking for was a guide to the electronics of a tube amp with the intent to better understand how to modify them and better understand the connectionn between the wiring diagram and the musicallity of these complex machines and this book just seems like an old electrician thats never held a guitar plugged into an amp tooting his own horn. Not helpfull at all to a musician and not even to a repairman/electrician for that matter.

Firstly, let me say that I'm a tech in my own repair shop. I read the book because frankly you can never read enough and it's great to have all the info you can on hand.

Tom's book is well written and easily understood. From a technicians stand point it's all basic stuff unless you know nothing about tubes. From a players stand point I believe this book could save you the price of the book the first time something goes wrong with your amp, maybe many times that cost. He does a good job explaining tube amps and what's what in there. The troubleshoot charts may be worth the price of the book alone. If you own a tube amp and have the mind set to approach the hazards, and he covers safety techniques, involved in working around very high and dangerous voltages then this book will pretty much help you repair about 90% of the things that go wrong in a tube amp. The other 10% is stuff that throws the best of us and wouldn't be easily covered in a manufacturer's service manual.

He covers everything from the history and basics of electronics, the tools and how to use them, even a great bit about proper soldering technique, to all the parts used in amps. The "What Not To Do" is just simply great advice. If one thing is missing it would be the lack of basic circuit section layouts and schematics. It's very well known that all tube amps are much the same inside and even the basic schematic of a Fender Tweed Bassman would have been most helpful in visualizing how these parts inter-relate.

There are a few things that need revising as the book is dated but the fact that tube amps haven't changed much in 50 years pretty much means these changes aren't important. They are mostly just changes that have happened since the book was printed and relate to the market and not the technology. I would also like to see the book rebound as I had trouble when some of the pages started falling out and I had to figure out how to get them back into the binder.

I give this book the rating I do because for a player this is one of the most helpful books you could buy. From my perspective, I learned a few things and have a nice reference on hand.

There's not much that I respect more than when somebody does a really good job. I'm partway through this book, and loving it. It explains things at a level of detail that works very well for me, and in simple English. I wouldn't say it's completely perfect; p 42 tells us how an inductor is used in a tube amp's power supply filter circuit to clean up the "ripple" in rectified DC, without telling us what filter circuits, ripple and rectification are. So there are terms for electrical and magnetic phenomena that I expect will be further clarified as I continue to read. It helps that I have a little electronics background, and have been brushing up on it lately.

Overall, though, I'm VERY happy with this book. I don't think it will work for me to expect one book to present everything I want to know about tube amps. I think I'll get where I want to go by reading from multiple sources, multiple times, and trying things out on my amps. My impression so far, though, is that I'm very glad I have this book as one of my sources. It's not the only book I would recommend on this subject, but it is the first book I would recommend.

For what I was looking for the book has too much info on electrons and protons. The section on using a multimeter does not show you how to set it. Just touch one lead here and the other one here. Not very helpful. Example: to check output transformer, check resistance in primary and secondary. ¿ there is no diagram to show you the primary and secondary wires or how to set the multimeter to make that check. I think this book could be useful if the author would have gone to the level of showing diagrams of components being tested and pictures of how to set up the multimeter. Again, the first few chapters are about electric theory like defining Matter, Mass, Inertia, Solids Liquids and Gas. I just wanted a book that would explain how to fix an amp and show me how to do it. This book was disappointing for me.

This is a well-written book that describes how musical instrument tube amplifiers and speakers work, but it is by no means a service manual. I would highly recommend the book for someone who is interested in learning how guitar amplifiers work. It has clear descriptions of which outline the many components of a combo amp. The troubleshooting flowcharts and other technical resources are useful. I would suggest "The Complete Guide to Guitar and Amp Maintenance" as a supplement to the purchase of this book, if you are interested in learning how to repair a guitar amplifier or speaker. In my opinion, it only earned three stars because of its misleading title.

Wonderful resource for the amp mechanic. A great first book with all of the basics. Great insights from a very experienced amp tech.

I have been playing electric bass for about 7 months now. I was curious about tube amplifiers and when I saw a deal on craigslist for and Ampeg V4, I jumped at it. I took it to get recapped and retubed and that's when I became more intrigued about its inner workings. I also felt like this might be something I could do myself, rather than pay someone else. Even with the repair work done, it still has some issues and I was hoping this book would get me started on figuring things out on my own.

I bought this book to start my education on tube amplifiers. There are some things this book does really nicely and there are other aspects that are severely lacking.

The author does a really nice job of introducing concepts of electricity. I have some background with physics back in college on the subject and this was a great refresher. The sections on resistors, capacitors, and transformers is also well done. Unfortunately when he gets to tubes things start to go sideways. While the text is very detailed, the cheap accompanying graphics to explain the concepts he's outlining about tubes make it very difficult to fully grasp what he's talking about. He recovers with a nice section on speakers, but falters again on the biasing section. Now, as I understand, one of the most important parts of replacing power tubes is making sure they are correctly biased. As such, you'd expect him to walk you through this process. It doesn't get the treatment it deserves unfortunately. In fact, he starts throwing up oscilloscope tracings without even discussing what you are looking at.

The section on tools was very good, but could use some updating. He cleverly has you build some maintenance specific devices to get you acquainted with a soldering iron and provides a chapter on "What Not To Do" with your tube amplifier.

When it finally comes to troubleshooting your amplifier the author has a chance to unite all the electrical principles he explained earlier with the problems that can manifest in your amplifier. I was hoping that microphonic tubes would be explained, and what is going on electrically when hum occurs. Instead, he breaks it down into algorithms. This may be useful in running an efficient shop but it doesn't help in understanding why I'm doing what I'm doing. To be fair there are a few explanations but only a sentence long at most.

The last section has various mods that someone that is somewhat experienced with servicing amps would find useful. For the uninitiated like me, I wouldn't really consider them right now.

I give it three stars (I'd give it three and a half if I could). It gave me an excellent start in my quest for understanding these pieces of equipment. I found quite a few helpful hints throughout. The primer on electricity was sound. The book is in dire, dire need of an upgrade and could use photos rather than the cheap word paint sketches it has to explain concepts. Tube amps can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. This book gave me a healthy respect for that. I haven't been encouraged to climb in mine yet though to do any service work. I need more visual instruction about discharging capacitors and hopefully getting a handle on biasing.

From here, I plan on getting a few more basic electronics books as well as a DVD on amp repair so I can see with my eyes what is going on. I was hoping this book would get me there but it hasn't.

That said, I will refer back to it often I think. And when I get seasoned, I'll return back to the mods he discusses.