DC area Tube Amp Seminar?

Somebody must want to do this stuff. Just look at how many clinics Weber is putting on. You ought to ask this question in the main amp section. This section doesn't seem to get as much traffic.

 

Mike,

That sounds like a great idea. I would love to go to something like this, but I am not really local to you. Once you have a date in mind, I would like more details. If things worked out, I may be able to make the trip down to DC for it.

Dan

 

Mike:

I would definitely drive down for that. I've been looking for an excuse to do another road trip down to DC so I can go to Jaleo and the Spy Museum. And, BTW, thanks for the tube rec's I emailed you about. I'll be placing an order soon!

One thing I think would be really helpful to your customers and to your business is to bring a few identical amps set up with current production v. NOS tubes. For most people, hearing the differences between tubes is a difficult/expensive thing to accomplish. Also cool would be a comparison of matched triode v. unmatched PI's.

I think a great topic would be to cover various aspects of amp design and why someone might want one type over another (as in, long-tail pair PI v. split-load v. paraphase, etc.).

I would say, for your purposes, I would try to keep things focused on how you can educate your customers or potential customers on how your products can improve their amp ownership experience, while teaching the seminar participants a bit more about their amps...

 

Hi Mike,

I might be interested, but agree with you that the tube sampling event would be of less interest as part of a paid course, that's more like a get-together thing IMO.

I'd be interested in covering common amp problems and how to diagnose them (like why is my homebrew 6G16 Brown Vibroverb now blowing fuses & the reverb driver, and possib. the rvrb xformer -- in the shop for that now, I have no idea how I'd Dx that and trace around to be sure that no other components were damaged, that would be a great topic of interest); the cap job (done one, could always use a refresher).

Amp design issues would be of interest more in passing than as the real meat since I doubt I'll ever design one, but am interested in better understanding how they work and how some basic problems can be dealt with.

For reference in terms of sophistication level, I've built an Allen Kit with little or no problem, have done a cap job on my old Vibrolux Rev. with some basic show & tell how-to from an amp tech friend, but I'm not a physics guy or a diagnostician at all (and would like to learn more).

Biasing is of interest, less in terms of how to do basic measurement and adjust a bias pot (which I'm familiar with), more in terms of when you get into, e.g., a cathode based amp (tweed Deluxe) and may need to swap a resistor (like, duh, which ones, and what values?)... or about how to install a bias pot in an amp that doesn't have one.

Just some ideas, I think it would be good to balance between the more technically sophisticated and those like me that are handy but not electronics/physics & math majors, LOL.

 

I should clarify maybe... I agree w/ you on reading schematics and Ohm's Law. I don't have it memorized but know the importance of needing to refer to it.

Practical applications of it would be of interest (the obvious and, maybe to some of us, less obvious).

On the homebrew: it was built by a good amp tech friend in Ill. and worked fine for months and through gigs, just last week started that problem, so definitely a diagnostic learning experience, less a startup issue (I didn't make that clear at all in my 1st note). But something happened between the last gig I used it at (last July-Aug.) and last week.

Thanks,
Jon: