Inside Tube Amps: The Book on Tube Amps Technology [Paperback]

Dan Torres (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998

A complete manual on vacuum tube guitar amplifiers covering the entire technology all written in a musician friendly style. Illustrated with layout drawings and schematics. Includes making a complete Class A amplifier, modifications, repairs, service, how-to-do-it, bias, preamps, rectifiers, transformers everything about amplifiers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Dan Torres has taken his many years of experience as a technician and designer and has condensed it all into one easy to read, musician friendly manual. I learned more cool stuff about amps in 10 minutes with this book then I've learned in my entire musical life. Everything from tube selection to power transformers to even building an entire Class A amplifier is covered without the rocket science math and theory that would leave most of us running for cover under our acoustic guitars. -- 20th Century Guitar Magazine January 1996

Dan Torres, a veteran of the amp modification and repair biz, explains the nuts and bolts of tube amp design without the anguish of quadric equations. This 310 page soft cover's easy-to-read chapters cover schematics, preamp and power amp design, filter caps, biasing, transformers, tubes, rectifiers etc. - This excellent book gives you a thorough grounding in what makes a tube amp tick. An absolute must read for anyone. -- Guitar Player Magazine July 1995

Inside Tube Amps is clearly written in a musician friendly style. It is a complete manual on tube driven guitar amplifiers and covers design, modification, troubleshooting, and repairs. Everything is here from building your own Class A amp from scratch to sorting out power supplies, filter caps, and power transformers. There are charts, graphs and nicely finished illustrations throughout the book which help with explaination of the text. -- Vintage Guitar Magazine May 1995

From the Publisher

Inside Tube Amps is very popular world-wide, with booming sales and great reviews by musicians and technicians everywhere.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Torres Engineering; 2nd edition (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966974301
• ISBN-13: 978-0966974300
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,596,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful but uneven, January 3, 2001

By 

"charmhouse" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inside Tube Amps: The Book on Tube Amps Technology (Paperback)

This book has a good deal of information and is obviously written by someone who knows his amps, but it is not clearly written and is not really for the uninitiated. While the schematics of the different sections of an amp are useful, there are still unexplained terms and the presumption that everyone owns a Fender or Marshall amp. If you are looking for more broadly applied information about tube amps, look elsewhere. Another gripe for me is the cheesy printing and lack of even one real photo to aid in explaining parts layout (This is not an inexpensive book!). Good if you own an newer Fender or Marshall and want to make it sound more vintage or want to troubleshoot amp problems. Not for the homebrew amp crowd.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ..., July 31, 2001

By 

Mr. Dazenski (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inside Tube Amps: The Book on Tube Amps Technology (Paperback)

This book contained lots of information, but the way it was presented made it extremely difficult to accomplish my final goal -- to build a class A amplifier. The book is not a tutorial on so much the construction of tube amps, but rather a long list of modifications. Perhaps the biggest problem that plagues this entire book is that the author repeatedly tells you to open up your '60s Marshall or Fender or Traynor amp, all of which are extremely expensive and not exactly readily available. Because I don't own any of those amps, I was stuck to just read about adding more midrange to a '66 Marshall JTM, rather than learning how midrange actually works. Also, the author spends too little time on important subjects (tubes in general were basically covered in 3 or 4 confusing sentences...).

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Valuable information, poorly packaged., March 30, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Inside Tube Amps: The Book on Tube Amps Technology (Paperback)

There aren't many basic, layman-level books out there concerning the field of tube amplification. This book is one of the few that is billed as such. It does offer a lot of good information that is unavoidably technical, yet presented in such a way as to be accessible to the beginning amp hobbyist. However, the reader is forced to wade past some pretty bad writing that is awash in typos, bad grammar and a condescendingly conversational "style". Clearly, no copy editor was ever allowed near the book prior to printing. It does seem to have, at least, been spell-checked. It's really too bad, though, because this book does try to fill a much-needed niche. If Torres can see his way to overhauling the text in future editions by letting a qualified third-party proofread it, then I could easily see the rating upped to at least four stars.

One other comment of a purely mechanical nature is that my copy of the book was missing several pages of text in the chapter on power tubes. Or more precisely, I should say that the pages themselves were there... only they were blank!