Quote from: vices like vipers on January 20, 2011, 06:05:59 PMHey everyone, I have been lurking around here for a little while.Nothing wrong with that. The higher voltages of tubes turned me away, as I'm clumsy enough to really hurt myself. It's been a while, so I'd feel confident now but when I started I didn't have the safety knowledge or equipment to be effective.
I would like to build my own amp, but I have no idea where to start.
I was going to build a Tube amp, but then I saw the price of tubes, and that just turned me off of that idea. So now I'm looking into solid state.
Quote from: vices like vipers on January 20, 2011, 06:05:59 PM1. I have a bunch of computer parts (and computer power supplies), I was wondering if there is any way I could use them?Sort of, but it winds up being a lot of work to salvage things. The best computer parts to salvage from are really old ISA and PCI soundcards and occasionally old CD-ROM drives, as they sometimes have an amp chip you can use (google the part number for a datasheet). Most of the stuff will be surface mount and very difficult to work with. It makes for great soldering and desoldering practice, but tends not to be worth it in the end unless you're very, very low budget (as I am).
You may find folks out there using old computer power supplies to power their projects, but I'd recommend caution for two big reasons and a little one:
First, they're capable of extremely high power compared to the needs of most of the circuitry you'll be working with. This means that if you have a short somewhere the computer power supply will happily pump out several to tens of amps and cause parts and wires to smoke and glow before the current limiting kicks in. Wall wart power supplies and batteries are much safer to work with until you're ready to start working with mains powered power amps, and a fault will likely only cause your parts to get hot or glow for a moment as opposed to the fireworks a high current supply is capable of providing.
Second, they're switching based supplies with the wrong sort of voltages (mostly). An older AT supply (one with a switch attached) will usually have high current supplies for +12V, +5V, and +3V, and low current (or absent) supplies for -5V and -12V. Newer ATX supplies (big 20 plus pin motherboard connector) will often omit the low current supplies and crank up the amperage well beyond the older AT versions. These are really inconvenient voltages when working with audio, which often requires +/- 15V or higher, or 30V plus in a single ended supply.
Third, they're switchmode power supplies that aren't really designed for low noise. When you're working on a preamp and trying to minimize noise it's very irritating to work with a noisy supply. This is less of a concern, and can be solved somewhat with filtering and post regulation.
Quote from: vices like vipers on January 20, 2011, 06:05:59 PM2. How would I go about building my very own solid state amp?I can not recommend Teemuk's book highly enough. I'm on my third read through of it, interspersed with other books. It's worth taking the time to download. It's over 400 pages of everything you'll need after you've mastered the basics.
(I have dial up, so it is kind of hard to download teemuk's book. But if I need it, I will try and download it tonight)
I'm with Joecool on the Little Gem. It's an excellent, simple project to get you started and it'll be useful forever. It works great as a sanity check, something you're sure works just fine and you can use as a go-to when you want to be sure the signal you're using is good. That, and if you hook it up to a proper guitar speaker it'll amaze you how good it sounds for being so simple.
Quote from: vices like vipers on January 20, 2011, 06:05:59 PMBefore we get started on the amp, we are going to make a Breath conttroler like the one Meshuggah uses.I had to look that one up. I couldn't find a schematic, but it sounds like a pretty advanced project to start with! It's always good to have a big idea pushing you to learn all the little bits, so if it starts to look like too much don't despair, just set it aside for a bit and build something simple to get more practice.
Tat way I will get some more experience with wiring and stuff.
Hope that helps some.