gofar99 Messages: 1949 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, Sure got you wound up... Anyhow I have run into the same thing with books. I used to do work on PCs and would read all the text books on them. Then I started to discover errors. The more I read the more errors I found. Finally I gave on the experts and did things the way they should be. I moved on to (actually back to) audio. At first I thought that many of the reference materials were pretty good. Same thing happened. Errors all over the place. I have a few pretty good reference materials now and do refer to them from time to time, but the things I design now are radically different from any that most folks would find in texts. It seems that a vast majority of the current crop of valve audio gear is stuck in 1970. True there was some pretty good stuff then, but we can do better now. I get a real hoot out of folks that ask me (rather regularly I might add) about a well know design that was popular in the late 60's. I generally say it is not too bad if you get rid of about 2/3 the parts. As for guitar amps...wow. I designed my first about 6 months ago. I got huge amounts of generally non-specific guidance. Some was good, much was hearsay. So I went my own way and designed what would seem to do the job. I took the prototype to the LASF having never heard it play. A number of folks there played it. A few comments were sufficient. One guy said he could never really like either his Fender or Marshal after just a few minutes on the one I brought. Very easy to set up and play. Super clean channel. Can do nearly anything. The only negative comments were related to the fact it is about 6 months to a year away from being an Oddwatt product. There were people that wanted to put a deposit on ones without even a fixed (but will not be either real costly or cheap) cost estimate. So much for the "experts" in that field. See now you got me going. Gads.