aja wrote
Matta? Karel? TomCat? Tamago? Some insight perhaps?
Do you employ similar techniques? ?
To be honest, to me it looks like a guy who does car sound SPL installs tried to mod this amp. Because bigger gauge wires must be better, right? He has probably upgraded to using railway tracks for connections these days...
All it needs now is a flux capacitor and 21 jigawatts!
aja
I don't really have much to say... and this is what ties in with arguments I've had with people on this very forum's chatroom on the subject:
I have become aware of how many people on the internet, especially in the United States now fancy themselves as electronic engineers, and cock a snoot at those of us who actually know WTF we are doing. It seems there is now this whizbang of a notion that bigger is better e-penis contest, fuelled presumably by programmes such as mythbusters and brainiacs, with a plentiful supply of brain donors who want to shoot a video clip of blowing something up, posting it to YouTube, all in the name of 'look at me I can laaik to be cools"
I just usually laugh at the shit people come up with on the internet. Like me, the real engineers out there, we choose not to publish our projects online. Call me an asshole but I will adopt a very Stewart Copeland sort of attitude about this.
I've been building tube amps since I was 17 years of age, regular amps longer, plus I think, that, combined with my 10 years of experience as a bona fide electronic engineer plus the fact that I've been doing electronics since I was 10 years old, that when I say a thing needs to be done a certain way, I fully expect people to listen to me. I am not here to blow my own horn, but, I have the experience, most don't! For this same reason I don't go around fancying myself as some shit hot guitarist either.
When it comes to electronics- you are either born with it or you're not! That I am sorry is a fact. The university can teach you a lot of math and calculus and
theoretical circuit design and MATLAB, all of which are
NO SUBSTITUTE for hard-won design experience or unique and innovative circuits which I have designed, in consumer and industrial products sold in South Africa.
For many years, I was involved in audio, until I discovered my passion, which is digital hardware and writing software. Audio is so easy and quite frankly, a little bit of a bore. There is simply no challenge to it! There is not much you can do with a valve amp, it is kind of like a Fender Strat: Lee Fender and co worked the design out, it works, is mass reproducible and is widely copied and considered an industry standard. More than that, you cannot radically change the thing (and yes I am aware of Parker guitars) and that is how it is. Why try and change a proven design.
99,9% of all the tube amps I've seen are derived from one groundbreaking design published after World War II by a certain Mr. Williamson, it became known as the Williamson Amplifier.
All you can do is play with valve output stages to optimize the output power and matching, improve stage couplings, input preamp configurations, but only within certain parameters to affect the overall tone. And quite frankly, if you have a single tube pre-amp, why the need for expensive pentodes on the output. I can do the same with FET's and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Even semiconductor amp power rails sag under load, and it can be arranged so that the sag is similar to that of a GZ34. The semiconductor diode is not that much more efficient than a tube rectifier. Incidentally Tom Scholz agrees strongly with me too on this key point.
