Hey all!
Like the title says, I was born decades too late! 28yo from New York, terrible guitar player but tube amps are what I love.
My background is more automotive than electrical, I can rebuild a car/motorcycle without hesitation (Currently finishing up on a 1966 Chrysler Newport flip project) and never really paid any attention to electrical more than I needed to with cars. Hell I even avoided electrical diagnostics on cars for a while. Was always a rock/metalhead and have evolved into a delta blues/dirty gritty blues with amps set to 10 fan. And before recently I was fine with any amp that had a distortion channel, didn't care what brand/circuitry.
I got my first tube amp about 2 years ago (Fender HRD) for free from the estate of a long time family friend who was an amp technician most of his life. He was a brilliant guitar player who was in the Navy in the 1960s and learned his electronics knowledge there. I do really wish I had an interest in this stuff when he was around, but 2020 Hindsight...
I helped his wife liquidate the remnants of his repair shop and as thanks she gave me free range to pick out what I wanted for myself and help her sell the rest. The HRD was ready to go minus needing a speaker, which one was found quickly in the shop and was a killer amp.
I got a good amount of diagnostic tools (Oscilloscopes, Variac, DMMs, Signal Generator, Super Cricket, etc) for free and all of his books that he had held on to over the years. I also got his back burner amps that, well were broken too. I started reading and honestly got overwhelmed and kind of gave up for a 9 month period and sold off some of the project amps (Univox U75 and Fender 140) until I had an issue with one of my amps and looked back at the books and Uncle Doug/Mr Carlson's Lab videos and suddenly it all made more sense.
So now I'm hooked and want to learn more on how these amps work, design theory and want to build my own as a project for the winter. I'll be here picking brains and trying to learn all the technical/design knowledge I can with the ultimate goal of designing and building an amp without copying or modifying a circuit. Nothing against building a clone, I will be building a few of those too, but I want to know how the people at Fender or Marshall took some electrical knowledge and fully designed the amps themselves.
Thanks in advance!
Topic: Younger Guy Born Decades Too Late, Fascinated with Tubes! (Read 2552 times)