07/19/07
       Hey everyone; Welcome to my site!
   My hobby is designing & building tube stereo equipment.
   I have no formal technical training, but by the age of 5 or 6, I was playing with batteries, flashlight bulbs, & slot car motors; experimenting & observing  the results of wiring things together in different ways. That was 40 years ago, and I have been studying, experimenting with, & working with electronics ever since.
   I design circuits using empirical/ experimental methods. Starting with a rough prototype of a single stage of an amplifier, I experiment with different component values & circuit configurations, observing & comparing the effects. (Feed a signal into a circuit and see what happens to the output signal when something is changed: different resistor, capacitor, supply voltage, etc.). Analog circuit design is always a matter of compromise/ tradeoff: improving any one aspect of a circuit's performance will invariably detract from some other aspect of it's performance (gain vs. bandwidth, power output vs. distortion, etc. etc.). That's one of the things I like about it; there's no single 'right' way to build an amplifier.
   I'm not into the 'tubes vs. solid state' debate: I think it's a subjective matter of personal preference, if you have a preference. If one sounds better to you, then it is better to/ for you.  Regardless of sound, I just like the way a pair of open-construction tube amps look : glass & steel, glowing filaments; they create an environment that you just don't get from solid state equipment. I also like the way that 1930's era tubes (triodes), coupled together with new technology transformers & capacitors in very simple, minimalist circuit designs can give such excellent sound; easily comparable to, or better than anything of new manufacture (in my, as well as many other's opinion).

03/22/08
    FINALLY, back to updating the site!