Building Valve Amplifiers

by Morgan Jones

Book Overview

Building Valve Amplifiers is a unique hands-on guide for anyone working with tube audio equipment--as an electronics hobbyist, audiophile or audio engineer. This 2nd Edition builds on the success of the first with technology and technique revisions throughout and, significantly, a major new self-build project, worked through step-by-step, which puts into practice the principles and techniques introduced throughout the book.

Particular attention...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0080966381
• ISBN13: 9780080966380
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: Newnes
• Length: 662 Pages
• Weight: 3.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Priceless...

This guy builds beautiful one-off tube amps. Amazing. The section on suspending the first stages of a tube amp to reduce microphonics using the elastics from you knickers pays for the book, right down to the calculation of the required mass for the circuit. I think everyone who want to build tube circuits will find some wacky techniques of interest. The book has nothing to do with tube amp theory. It's all about how to make a chassis with the required holes, wiring, grounding, etc. Lovely.

Building Valve Amp

It is a good book directed to beginners. You will find there many advices on how to plan an amp lay out and hints on metal working. Don't expect to find there math based circuit analysis for the advanced experimenter.

Wish i had bought this book 2 years ago!

When I started building Hi-Fi tube electronics a few years ago, I dove right in ,searched out what were touted to be awesome sounding circuits, only to be rewarded with buzzing, hissing and humming results, with little understanding of what went wrong! I took a fellow Diyer's advice, and purchased both of Morgan Jones books, "Valve Amplifiers" and "Building Valve Amplifiers". Well written and fairly easy to understand, the time I spent with those Books gave me the knowledge to turn those nasty noisey projects into well laid out, safe, audiophile grade equipment!

Definitive, don't build a tube amp without this!

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.