The older textbooks and tutorials, particularly the ones from the military, truly are the best resources for starting out, certainly far better than reading forums or websites. Once one understands basic electronics—resistors, capacitors, transformers, simple timing circuits, filters, etc.—it is possible to build upon that solid foundation with actual understanding. Building kits designed by others will never take one there. Being able to explain and analyze the circuit in the kit, however, is a very different proposition.
Agreed. I think knowing
why one is "doing something" - is much better than knowing
that one is "doing something."
The core difficulty with starting with a kit is the lack of teaching the basics of function or design, and the fact that the circuit is fixed: it is what it is, it does what it does, and that's not easily or readily modifiable. Is the goal of assembling the kit to (a) receive a tutorial in circuitry, (b) end up with a working object, or (c) both? Many circuits and kits cut corners to meet a low price point—just look at the ChiFi which is typically outright fraudulent at the criminal level—which a novice simply will not understand, cannot understand, and consequently will be bamboozled. (What are grid and screen stoppers for? Why was the value of a plate resistor or grid leak chosen? What are the effects of coupling capacitors? Cathode-bias bypass to avoid degeneration? What do any of these components even do in a circuit? Why use a cathodyne splitter instead of an long-tail pair? How does an output transformer work? Or a power transformer? How does biasing work? What is the filtering effect of Miller capacitance and why would this affect frequency response?) Many of the repair websites promote designs optimized for a particular purpose, such as guitar amplifiers, or for refurbishing designs which weren't that outstanding in the first place or are now dated, and which are endlessly replicated as if holy writ handed down on some stone ur-document where the slightest change is heresy.
Yes, I think perhaps an apt analogy here would be something along the lines of a 1980's Soviet automobile designer who wants to learn the craft, but is instead forced to work as a Yugo mechanic. He or she will learn how to fix a Yugo, but won't understand how to create something better than a Yugo (unless they embark on self-training). Mikhail Kalashnikov comes to mind as someone who didn't want to (metaphorically) "fix Yugos" anymore, BTW.
He was entirely self taught.
The forums are often filled pernicious nonsense which, absent a basic understanding of electrical engineering, is unquestioningly accepted and must only be subsequently unlearned. Particularly with respect to the purported magickal sonic properties of components or circuits where endless repetition nonsense has created dogma, mistaken for fact. Or power supplies. I doubt that even a simple majority of forum participants could explain the basis for RMS or why peak voltage is higher, why a half-wave or voltage-double stresses a transformer, and why one simply cannot throw thousands of µF onto a power supply for sonic bliss. Simulation? What's that? Many promote random tube substitutions—high mu for high Gm, for example, where gain is completely irrelevant but transconductance significantly matters—and then crow about substantial "soundstage improvements" which are utterly impossible from an engineering standpoint, as the circuit no longer properly functions. I doubt most could explain how a capacitor works, let alone filter characteristics. Confirmation bias is pervasive, as is trusting ears over objective, and reproducible, measurements using test equipment.
Yes. The main reason I am here is that I hate BS. There's a certain social media website where people just repeat what they have heard. They are actually all like this, come to think of it. It's a combination of confirmation bias and the pernicious internet echo chamber effect. As you know, to make matters worse - the terms that people use are entirely subjective. "Soundstage," "bass extension," "air," "ink," "forward," "recessed," "musical," etc. . ---> those terms only mean something when
they are defined. Even then, the words are entirely subjective (e.g., what is "musical" to me might be "dry" to someone else,
et vice versa.) To add a third level of sadness, much of what people see on the internet, at least on mainstream social media sites, falls into the realm of influencer marketing, if not downright shilling.
The reason for that is a lack of basic understanding. Without a decent grasp of component functionality and knowledge of circuit behavior it is highly difficult, if not downright impossible, to separate complete nonsense from absolute truth, or to navigate the often confusing regions between the two. Foundational knowledge is crucial to be able to evaluate the writings. Here there be dragons.
Agreed 100 percent. This gap between what people
think they know, and what they
actually know - that is actually the gap
through which a lot of money is made, sadly. It's literally a form of "knowledge arbitrage" in which influencers, shills, and useful idiots ply their trade (or in the case of useful idiots, ply the trades of others and not even realize it).
The ten-thousand hour rule is well known; the corresponding rules of thousand hour, hundred hour, ten hour, and one hour, less so. A hundred hours of study should yield enough understanding to be able to design a simple amplifier and have it work reasonably well, or to take an existing one and modify it to better function. Once the basics have been mastered, it is possible to look at a design and understand the how's and why's and therefore's.
I like this. I knew the 10k rule, but not the subdecimal concept. If my experience on other things is correct, I would venture to also say that as I learn more, I will realize I know less.
Kits and forums will never yield that level of understanding. Reading actual books will. The books written in the old days (1940s to 1960s) tend to have a breadth and completeness which is rarely seen in today's offerings. That's not nostalgia, it's a combination of basic literacy and written skills, better education, and higher standards for communication. I have entire shelves filled with those books; highly educational and a delight to read. Many, like the Radiotron Designer's Handbook by Fritz Langford-Smith (aka RDH, with the giant 4th edition preferred) or the Electronic Designer's Handbook (2nd ed) by Giacoletto are more suitable as reference materials than as textbooks. Norman Crowhurst's papers and books are better suited for those just starting out, as are the military texts.
I will obtain those. I agree with what you say about older books. People were simply more literate 50 years ago. There has been a general dumbing down. The irony is that this dumbing down (by definition) decreases the amount of information that can be communicated per 100 words. There are more words now, but they mean less. This cycle of "smarting up," then "dumbing down" is ancient, BTW:
Heaven and Earth are impartial;
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The wise are impartial;
They see the people as straw dogs.
The space between heaven and Earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.
-- Tao Te Ching, Ch.5
I'm most definitely not saying you need the equivalent of a degree in Electrical Engineering. Far from it. (I consider most of my engineering education to be a complete waste of time and money, as it was either mathematical manipulation for its own sake or memorization and regurgitation without any analysis of practical utility.) I'm suggesting that with a few weeks of reading, say fifty hours (roughly two hours a day for 30 days, or about one hour a day for sixty days), you'd accumulate enough understanding to be able to analyze most tube circuits and build your own simple experiments.
Yes. That was my experience with learning "the law." What we learned in law school was "how to think like a lawyer." We also learned some basic black letter that you can learn from Nolo books in maybe a few months of intense study. Most of the learning happened after law school. It's literally more like trade school. This is kind of the big secret. Law is actually not that hard, but there are great financial incentives to create artificial barriers to entry into the trade.
As I above noted, the military books (check out the basic electronics books as well) were designed to rapidly convert recruits into radio operators. The coursework was learnable in a month or two, which was all the time the Army and Navy had to create an army of technicians. Wartime and all that. Start there. Learn the basics of electronics and tubes, and you'll be able to look at any schematic or kit and say, I can use this as a starting point. Because if your goal is to understand, that's the only way to get there. If you just want something which works, you can rebuild any number of vintage amplifiers and end up with a result far superior to a kit.
Thank you again for the wonderul and insightful observations. I have my mission now. On it!
