Description

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This book is a beginner's guide that brings you, from the basic concepts of vacuum tubes, up to the design of a complete integrated push-pull vacuum tube amplifier.This book first introduces the needed principles, to designing and understanding vacuum tube amplifiers. Then, it considers all relevant aspects for designing an integrated push-pull vacuum tube amplifier, including the power supply unit. Finally, a real integrated push-pull vacuum tube amplifier is designed from scratch, using the various concepts discussed in this book.This book makes an extensive use of figures and proposes several practical examples, to design various parts of the circuits and to compute values of the needed components. This significantly contributes to simplify some possibly difficult concepts addressed.The book is structured as follows: Chapter 1: "Introduction" introduces the book itself and gives some suggestions on how to read it.Chapter 2: "Vacuum tube basics" introduces the needed concepts to understand vacuum tubes. This is a very basic introduction needed for the non-initiated. If you already know what vacuum tubes are and how they operate, you can skip this chapter.Chapter 3: "Vacuum tubes as amplifiers" discusses how vacuum tubes can be used to obtain an amplifier. It introduces the concepts of operating conditions, loadline, biasing techniques, and amplifier classes.Chapter 4: "Integrated push-pull vacuum tube amplifier" goes into the details of designing an integrated push-pull vacuum tube amplifier. It discusses the single-ended and push-pull configurations, the various needed stages (power, phase-split, and input stages), and global negative feedback.Chapter 5: "Power supply unit" discusses how to build the power supply unit for a vacuum tube amplifier. It introduces rectifier configurations and filters to reduce voltage ripple, to have a quiet amplifier. It explains how to estimate expected output DC voltage, ripple, and current delivered. It also discusses how to design power supply for the fixed bias circuit and for the filaments of the vacuum tubes.Finally, Chapter 6: "Step by step design of a push-pull tube amplifier" use all needed notions to design an entire integrated push pull vacuum tube amplifiers. It discuss the design of the power stage, the phase-split, and the input stage. It discusses the design of the global negative feedback loop. It also provides the design of the corresponding power supply unit.