Building Valve Amplifiers

Rating:
Summary: Useful practical guide to building amplifiers...
Review: ...this book contains a lot of good, hard to find advice on the pratical issues that arise when building a tube amplier. This allows the novice to learn quickly without having to learn only by their own mistakes (which can be dangerous, frustating and costly). There are useful discussions on choosing basic equipment (although perhaps a little too much) such as Digital Volt Meters and Oscilloscopes. The author also usefully discusses sourcing components which is, in my experience, the big hidden work item you run into building your own electronics (especially tube electronics) these days.

This book, sensibly, does not contain a lot of theory (the author moved that to his other book -- which I did not find useful) or circuits for re-use -- but for the practical issues of safely producing a safe, robust, low noise amplifier this book is very good.

My interest is primarily guitar amplifiers and this book is equally applicable to that domain as it is to hi-fi amplifiers, albeit without any special consideration of guitar amplifier issues or circuits.

The authors writing style is fine (it could, perhaps be more concise in some areas) but the pictures and layout of the book are dated and, given that, the price seems high (although this book represents better value than the author's theory book, in my opinion).

Rating:
Summary: Definitive, don't build a tube amp without this!
Review: I recently purchased this, the companion work to the author's definitive book on tube amp design, Valve Amplifiers. There are quite a few books on how to design a tube amp, but very few resources available on how to safely construct them. I say safely because vacuum tube amplifiers use voltages that are lethal, some extreme designs using voltages in excess of a kilovolt! Safety is essential when dealing with tube amps at all times.

Originally, the author covered amplifier construction techniques in the first edition of Valve Amplifiers, but that volume is now in it's third edition and is over six hundred pages long WITHOUT the construction section. It's understandable that Mr. Jones decided to put out a separate tome on amp construction, since the construction information is as long as the entire first edition of Valve Amplifiers.

This book goes into great detail on how to build a chassis, wiring techniques, PCB's, metalwork and assembly using only hand tools. Examples are given of tools to be used (often with more than one choice for a given job) and how to use them properly. The book then goes on to explain the use of oscilloscopes, distortion measurements and troubleshooting, completely illustrated with pictures and drawings needed to do these things. There are also useful tricks, such as using a discarded radio tuning capacitor to find the optimum capacitance for feedback compensation.

This, along with Valve Amplifiers, are the definitive modern works for the amateur on how to design and build tube amplifiers. If you're interested in tube DIY audio, there just aren't any substitutes for these books, they're simply the best currently available, period.

Rating:
Summary: shop and compare
Review: It is safe to assume that if you are considering this book, you feel you have ingested enough theory and are now ready for the nuts and bolts of assembling a vacuum tube amp of your own.
(Not the least of which regards the critical importance of safety when dealing with lethal voltages)
My rating of this book is a little low, inasmuch as the buyer might be disappointed to see so few words about assembly, and so many more chapters of theoretical/empirical esoterica. The author here is no slacker. He obviously has spent a lifetime in the field and has a vast body of expertise to share; and does so in that ever popular British circumlocutive amble. There is indeed a lot of subtle minutiae in the book that is informative, entertaining, and edifying. But aren't we interested in what to do and what not to do and why we do it this way and not that way regarding assembling the actual components? You can find all that info in this book; including what tools will help immensely and save a lot of starting over, and cursing inanimate objects on the way to starting over.
(and be encouraged to discover that even this practised author, Morgan Jones, has a bit of dread when he first powers up-hoping not to see sparks & smoke!)
But there are a couple more books that you might also consider:... On precisely what is taking place in a tube amp, one can do no better than to make sure to have on your electronics shelf, An all American classic by the late great USAF Colonel John Rider (of Rider Technical Publication fame)-a reprint of his superbly well written "Inside The Vacuum Tube". He takes you one step at a time; and at the beginning of a new chapter, reviews "what we learned, and explains what we will now learn and now build upon in the next chapter". In other words, it is a very well thought outand in depth treatise, with a beginning a middle and an end. You will emerge with a command of vacuum tube circuitry.
Once that is digested, ...and perhaps you are precisely at that point now... you want to know exactly why you use this value of resistor, and that value of capacitor, and this arrangement of components, and not THAT kind of resistor, etc,.. and I do mean exactly how...you will find no better book than another fine reprint by the title of "Mullard Tube Circuits For Audio Amplifiers" If it comes down to choosing one over the other, with both time and budget concerns...I'd go for the Mullard book, hands down, nol contendre. It gives all the exact reasons for why we provide feedback, precisely how the phase splitter splits the signal for the push pull, and why we even want a push pull rather than a single ended amp; and diagrams for drilling out the chassis, and time honored, and tested methods of assembly. 'S alright? 'Salright!