Before You Begin Your DIY Journey...

[Hummingwire]

What would you advise as a first tube design project?

 

[tony hunt]

What would you advise as a first tube design project?

What do you need; a microphone, a pre-amp, a guitar amp or a something else?

 

[Potato Cakes]

What would you advise as a first tube design project?

This probably would be better answered in a new thread.

Thanks!

Paul

 

[Gold]

I generally refer to myself as an advanced hack. None of this comes naturally to me. I find it both frustrating and enjoyable. I never feel like I really know what I’m doing no matter how much better I get.

 

[Phrazemaster]

I generally refer to myself as an advanced hack. None of this comes naturally to me. I find it both frustrating and enjoyable. I never feel like I really know what I’m doing no matter how much better I get.

#MeToo

 

[flyweight]

a friend of mine told me years ago. to understand audio engineering it would make sense to understand how the electronics work.
now years later I cannot say i fully do but am able to repair my equipment and build some great stuff.
I am trying to balance the diy as making records is the most important thing. diy can be a big rabbit hole like eurorack.
but it is just so facinating how pre-amps, compressors eq etc work.
The big reward for me in getting technically educated by the community is getting great tone out of my equipment. my modded guitar amps, mixer etc.

tone is everything

thank you too the real engineers willing to share you knowledge!

cheers Tim

 

[saltwaves]

I feel compelled to offer some advice to others

 

[Michael Tibes]

What would you advise as a first tube design project?

Some videos or reading about safety and high voltage / mains wiring - unless you already know what you are doing. Preamps need less energy to run than a power amp, so they store less energy in the power supply. This might make it slightly safer to work on such things. I started out with big guitar amps (100W Marshall) and I just got lucky those few times I forgot to discharge the psu. But that was in the late 80s with far less available information to the common countryside kid.

I remember there used to be some nice looking chinese tube projects like a baxandall tube eq on ebay / alibaba, maybe there is something interesting for you? There also used to be a tube preamp project on ebay which seemed nice.

Michael

 

[living sounds]

First "design" - do you mean to build an existing design or start something new? I would start with the former before I attempted the latter. And I would build something I can find good use for in the studio. To me that was mostly compressors... If you want to build a tube compressor, Heikki's transformerless compressor is a great project. Well documented, inexpensive and sounds great.

https://groupdiy.com/threads/transformerless-vari-mu-compressor-build-thread.78043/