Tube Quest: Part 1

Corbett | March 30, 2005 12:16 PM

As if I don't have enough to do already, I'm throwing myself into another wangdoodle project. Now I'm building my own tube amp for the club. For those music geeks in the know, it's a 1959 Fender Bandmaster clone, 35W, 3 x 10" speakers, with original circuitry. It will hopefully look something like this when it's done:

So I'm learning all about how to read circuit diagrams, how to solder, how not to electrocute myself, how to test capacitor loads, and way too much about transformers and the differences between AlNiCo and ceramic speaker magnets on guitar acoustics. Fascinating stuff.

Rather than go the easy road and buy a kit with all the parts in a bag from some custom amp shop in the US, I thought it would be more meaningful to go down to the little one man parts stores littered around Taipei, drink tea and pick the tubes, capacitors, and resistors out of rows of boxes on a shelf, next to the standard issue photo of CKS. Maybe even have some guy actually roll the output transformer to my specs, and let me have a couple cranks on it as well.

All this geek stuff leaves me wondering...

I'm wondering if using local parts/transformers will really effect the sound "so drastically" like a lot of these tube geeks say.

I'm also wondering if I really have to use Sprague/Vishay Atoms for the filter caps and orange drops for the other circuitry?

And I'm really wondering if I really have to use the standard issue EI core transformer rather than maybe a toroidal transformer?

But these are things I'll never know until it's finished.

Category: Music

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