This section is about valves - aka vacuum tubes. At this stage there are only a few articles (one of which has been on the site for some time), but this will be expanded as time permits. Although a topic I've avoided since starting The Audio Pages in 1998, it's quite obvious that they are not going away. Don't expect much in the way of projects though. There are already countless websites that cover nothing else, and adding more is not in anyone's interests.

So far, the material looks at the basics - the fundamental info on valves. This is followed by introductory info about the correct biasing of preamp valves and what gain you can expect from traditional valve stages. The third section does an analysis of an existing valve guitar amplifier, both to familiarise the reader with the basics of analysis and to point out that "guitar amp" and "careful engineering" do not belong in the same sentence. I've also looked at some of the myths that surround valves - while they may have considerable nostalgic value, that doesn't make them better than audio gear we can build today.

Further articles will look at hi-fi applications, techniques for minimising distortion, improving bandwidth and the like.

	Title	Description	Date
	Main Index
	Articles Index
	Valve Amplifiers	Do they really sound different? Includes a review of one of my valve amps	1999
	Valve Introduction	General info about valve types, terminology and performance	20 Oct 09
	Bias and Gain	Understanding transfer curves, biasing and gain calculations	24 Oct 09
	Valve Stage Analysis	Investigating an existing circuit to understand how everything works (or doesn't)	30 Oct 09
	Valve Myths	There are many myths about valves, and some of the more common ones are exposed.	09 Nov 09

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