Dave’s Amplifier Page
Book Review
Inside The Tube Amplifier by Dan Torres
First Edition 1995
I just completed my first read through of this book. Today is Monday and I bought it Friday. There is a lot of excellent reference material in this book that will be useful to any amp technician. A word of caution though, there are numerous mistakes in the book (ohm’s law stated incorrectly 66% of the time) and it is up to the reader to make sure he knows what Dan intended before working on any high voltage tube amplifiers. He is quite adamant about not being held responsible by using any of the information in the book and electrocuting yourself. He repeats the entire full-page disclaimer numerous times especially between chapters leading me to believe the book was originally written as separate articles and then combined later. The book is written in a conversational format as if you were visiting with Dan in his amplifier repair shop. The type is large enough that I was able to read it without using my special "old fogy" glasses. There is not a clear paragraph structure and sometimes each sentence is double-spaced from the next adding up to an incredible 310 pages. He claims the book’s intended audience is musicians not technicians, but having been in the electronics industry for 20 years, I still felt challenged with the material presented.
The Tube Amp by Aspen Pittman
4.1th Edition
I have owned this book for several years now and have read through it on several occasions. This book is definitely a compilation of several shorter articles. The typeset even changes from one chapter to the next. It has some beautiful photographs of vintage amplifiers and the last half of the book (767 pages) is nothing but schematics. There are some technical sections about biasing, troubleshooting and repairing tube amplifiers. There is even a section of tube data sheets for reference. I found the ‘history’ section fascinating reading. It describes how the pioneers of guitar amplifiers, especially Leo Fender, got started and progressed through the early years. He says this edition should be free from the ‘binding’ problems that plagued the earlier ones, but mine is falling apart.
Electronic Communication by Robert L. Shrader
Fourth Edition
This is my reference book on electronics. I studied out of an earlier edition in college that was almost entirely written about vacuum tubes. This edition also includes the solid state version of most of the circuits presented, but is still full of the old tube based examples. The book is written as a text for studying electronics and goes from Basic Electricity all the way through Radio Transmission and Radar. If you can find a copy of this book, add it to your library.