Amplifier tutorial

RetiredUnit1

RetiredUnit1

Well-known member
Hey, so, as a career I programmed computers - Manufacturing to Customer relations management I did it all. I even built an in house email system on a Data General Nova 3 before PC's were invented!

Retired now and futzing around with electronics. I know a great deal about building tube amps, from scratch. I even cut G10 epoxy board on my water lubricated diamond tile saw, and use my own designs made in Visio to place the turrets.

But transistors? Diddly. As in Diddly squat. I was looking for a place for solid state amplifier newbies like myself and found this site. Looks promising! I actually almost understood a few things, lol.... Anyway here's the link, hope it helps others.

www.tutorialspoint.com

Amplifiers Tutorial

An amplifier is an electronic circuit designed to improve the strength of electronic signals. Amplifiers are the fundamental components of various electronic devices and systems.
www.tutorialspoint.com www.tutorialspoint.com
 
Welcome to the forum! There are several members here that are E.E.s who will be able to point you in a good direction. Maybe knowing what type of transistor amps would help with the sorting. If it were hi-fi amps, I can recommend DIYaudio.com. I’m sure there are specific sites for guitar amps—I know several for tube amp discussions, but none for SS.
 
I had to look that up. I'm only in my early 40's so pictures like this look like a prop from a tv show. I've seen some big computers but that things like an Ampeg svt. Screenshot_20221018_191450.jpg
 
Mentaltossflycoon said:
I had to look that up. I'm only in my early 40's so pictures like this look like a prop from a tv show. I've seen some big computers but that things like an Ampeg svt.View attachment 34180
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Yup, that was it. The bottom unit was a four platter hard drive, each platter held 5 megabytes. That's a 2.5 HORSEPOWER linear motor 20 megabyte drive. The top platter was in a cartridge that could be removed. To backup, you'd put in a cartridge and backup the bottom two platters. Then you would have to put the top cartridge in and copy that to the bottom platters. Then you would put the backup cartridge for the top platter in the top and copy from the bottom to the top. Then you would put the bottom backup back in the top and copy from the top to the bottom. Then you would put the top platter in because backup was done and you could run the nightly routines.

That hard drive was $96,000!!!!!

And these were MINI-COMPUTERS! Mainframes took up an entire room, and you had to wear hearing protection to go inside....
 
Alan W said:
Welcome to the forum! There are several members here that are E.E.s who will be able to point you in a good direction. Maybe knowing what type of transistor amps would help with the sorting. If it were hi-fi amps, I can recommend DIYaudio.com. I’m sure there are specific sites for guitar amps—I know several for tube amp discussions, but none for SS.
Click to expand...
My friend Bob had a masters and worked at Paramount. His job consisted of setting on sets and watching them film. If something broke he fixed or replaced it asap, and then sat back down and watched the rest of the show. He got to work on some of the Star Trek movies, and Dr. Phil among many others.

Unfortunately Bob had too many free catered movie set gourmet meals, and smoked too many cigarettes and hated doctors. Passed away a week before Christmas 2010 at the untimely age of 51. He taught me all about tube amps but we never got to solid state.....
 
RetiredUnit1 said:
Hey, so, as a career I programmed computers - Manufacturing to Customer relations management I did it all. I even built an in house email system on a Data General Nova 3 before PC's were invented!

Retired now and futzing around with electronics. I know a great deal about building tube amps, from scratch. I even cut G10 epoxy board on my water lubricated diamond tile saw, and use my own designs made in Visio to place the turrets.

But transistors? Diddly. As in Diddly squat. I was looking for a place for solid state amplifier newbies like myself and found this site. Looks promising! I actually almost understood a few things, lol.... Anyway here's the link, hope it helps others.

www.tutorialspoint.com

Amplifiers Tutorial

An amplifier is an electronic circuit designed to improve the strength of electronic signals. Amplifiers are the fundamental components of various electronic devices and systems.
www.tutorialspoint.com www.tutorialspoint.com
Click to expand...

Cool, nice resource. I've built around half a dozen high powered solid state bass amps and just took the black box approach to the power amp section. Class D power modules with onboard SMPS are pretty much a commodity item these days and going that route allowed me to put more time and money into designing and building the front ends, both solid state and tube. One great resource for learning that side of things is Rod Elliot's site: https://www.sound-au.com/. If you're already good with tubes something like an Alembic F2B/Showman front end and a 700 watt ICEpower or Hypex amp module is a pretty straightforward build. I like working with opamps and rolling my own preamp boards too though.

Big computers? Yeah, NCE Fortran on punch cards in boarding school, IBM 360 et al. We did a field trip to IBM headquarters and saw the mighty Winchester hard drives in glass envelopes. One of my classmates was reputedly the first network hacker on the Dartmouth system and got kicked out of school...LOL.
 
Passinwind said:
Cool, nice resource. I've built around half a dozen high powered solid state bass amps and just took the black box approach to the power amp section. Class D power modules with onboard SMPS are pretty much a commodity item these days and going that route allowed me to put more time and money into designing and building the front ends, both solid state and tube. One great resource for learning that side of things is Rod Elliot's site: https://www.sound-au.com/. If you're already good with tubes something like an Alembic F2B/Showman front end and a 700 watt ICEpower or Hypex amp module is a pretty straightforward build. I like working with opamps and rolling my own preamp boards too though.

Big computers? Yeah, NCE Fortran on punch cards in boarding school, IBM 360 et al. We did a field trip to IBM headquarters and saw the mighty Winchester hard drives in glass envelopes. One of my classmates was reputedly the first network hacker on the Dartmouth system and got kicked out of school...LOL.
Click to expand...

I just finished a 18650 battery powered pedal brick, and have a 16 x 9v ports -- 16 x 5000mah (four batteries in parallel per sled, sleds wired in series) batteries prototype that I'm using for my pedals now. So that's 16v @ 20,000mah, bucked down to 9v at 92% comes out to about a zillion mah ;) I can go months without charging...

Super silent using a two MP1584EN buck downs (1.5mhz switching) and was thinking along the lines of making a battery powered high quality SS amp for busking (not that I need the money but it's fun). I did buy a 100w SS amp off of eBay and it's setting in a project box.

My next project is a 5F6-A 59 bassman tube amp, which I hope to have done by Christmas. But I'm really interested in just knowing more about solid state. I was born in the mid 50's, way before anyone made a solid state guitar amp, and I just think its sounds like something fun to learn more about.

I went to Pierce college in the 70's and we had a guy that I'm just going to call SM. SM did a fair amount of hacking in APL and granted himself 10,000 workspaces of memory. Got caught, got kicked out. Came back and BURNED DOWN THE COMPUTER ROOM AT PIERCE. Last I heard he was in prison for Arson.

He had memorized PI out to 100 digits, and one day followed a girl home and wrote 3.14159.......100 digits long in chalk on the sidewalk. I married that girl many years later, she thought SM was "a creepy guy". Here she is on our honeymoon to Tahoe in 1980.... I am sad to say she no longer walks this earth, having moved on to the next dimension after a 21 month fight with covid.....


Kim ready for bed Tahoe vacation.jpg
 
RetiredUnit1 said:
I just finished a 18650 battery powered pedal brick, and have a 16 x 9v ports -- 16 x 5000mah (four batteries in parallel per sled, sleds wired in series) batteries prototype that I'm using for my pedals now. So that's 16v @ 20,000mah, bucked down to 9v at 92% comes out to about a zillion mah ;) I can go months without charging...

Super silent using a two MP1584EN buck downs (1.5mhz switching) and was thinking along the lines of making a battery powered high quality SS amp for busking (not that I need the money but it's fun). I did buy a 100w SS amp off of eBay and it's setting in a project box.
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Cool stuff. I use an outboard power box for one of my basses and a rechargeable pedal brick was what I always had in mind for it. But for<2mA draw with my current preamp config I've stuck with a 9V battery in the box so far.

I'm old enough to have started with tubes in tech school but had to scramble to get up to speed with solid state stuff when I got a job at ARP building synths in the mid 70s. I've had a 100 watt tube head for bass in the works for a couple of years, maybe I'll finally bolt it together next week!
 
Passinwind said:
Cool stuff. I use an outboard power box for one of my basses and a rechargeable pedal brick was what I always had in mind for it. But for<2mA draw with my current preamp config I've stuck with a 9V battery in the box so far.

I'm old enough to have started with tubes in tech school but had to scramble to get up to speed with solid state stuff when I got a job at ARP building synths in the mid 70s. I've had a 100 watt tube head for bass in the works for a couple of years, maybe I'll finally bolt it together next week!
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My box can maintain continuous 3.6A spread out over the two 3A rated chips. 3A rating means at 3A they turn into smoke. This was just my prototype, I'm now working on a 1590xx enclosure stomp box power brick. Only one chip with 5 ports, going to put a pot for sag voltage on two of them so I can run distortion pedals at less than 9v output.

btw, the MP1584EN is software controlled and adjustable from like 3v to 30v. So it would be easy to have one chip at 9v and one at 12 or 18. I like the idea of having a pedal board with no wall wart, a LOT of mah, and you stomp on the power brick to turn it on/off.

So, like, it was obvious that my 16 batteries was way way more than needed for a long gig. And I used 4S sleds meaning four batteries per sled. Each sled making about 4V at 4 times the battery mah rating of 5000mah. Wired four in series making 20Ah of 16v which is more than the 3v needed as slack by the buck down converter.

This time I'm going to try to squeeze four 2S sleds into the enclosure. I'm pretty sure it'll fit. All the output jacks are isolated from each other on both sides of the jack with diodes, so in case a pedal shorts it won't affect any other pedal. I'll post the design after I test it. Maybe someone can make money with them, I'm *retired* and loving not working.
 
RetiredUnit1 said:
Well, SHOOT, this is exactly what I was hoping to find!!!! Gotta do my home maintenance chores now, I'll look at this and make a project from it later!!!!
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Great! I'd suggest you work from the end of that thread backwards a little to start, it's quite old and there's a new longer lower wider faster version that was just recently released. I think it may actually work a little better for acoustic guitar and mandolin than bass BTW, even though it's partly derived from Alembic and Wal DNA. There's a very decent chance of a PPCB version coming out eventually as well, I just need to tie down a bedrock build spec before we explore that.
 
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