TUBEDUDE wrote:Don't sweat a lack of extensive knowledge concerning theory or design engineering. If you have the basics down, can solder, and use good safety practices, much of the rest will be learned by experimenting.
I agree with that - however, having done both approaches, the more extensive your theoretical knowledge, the faster it will be to get your designs done. It took some centuries from the discovery of electricity in the form of batteries for people to just experiment their way into knowing Ohm's law. It was another long experimental process to transformers and triodes. Yet longer to reliable circuits. You have to ask yourself how much of that you want to re-create on your own.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants - but the shoulders are there! Go ahead, climb up on the shoulders and use them! Don't let lack of advanced theoretical basis stop you. On the other hand, (1) go learn what could kill you, so you stay alive to keep experimenting and (2) learn enough theory to speed up the artistic side of your work.
As stated above, theoretical design deals with perfect components, it doesn't take into consideration stray capacitance or inductance as you move components and wire around, or the inductive nature of caps or resistors etc.
It used to be that way, and is with beginners still. The more experienced and worldy-wise the designer, the more their theoretical designs toss in "perfect imperfections". If you don't know the exact stray capacitance, a little theoretical thought says that self capacitance of a wire might be a few pF per foot, and self-inductance might be a few nH per foot. Does that much stray stuff make a difference? Ahah! Theory and some math can tell you it does or doesn't.
The use of "perfect components" is a little misunderstood. It's true that a capacitor used in a set of equations is more perfect than any real-world cap. But you can add perfect resistors and perfect inductances to that capacitor to make a model of dirty real-world capacitors to any degree that you want to pursue it. It's that isolation into perfect components, which don't really exist, that lets us think in terms of "well, this is the main effect of this being there, but then there's some additional resistance in series with it, and some inductance, and ..." so we can add enough dirtiness to get an understanding of what is really going on.
Theory isn't everything, but it sure speeds things up. I would say that the best approach is to do what >good< real-world engineers do: learn the basics, collect what works along the way, and refine your theoretical knowledge along the way by noticing what works and hanging that knowledge in the right places on the theory-tree.
Which is what pdf64 is talking about:
pdf64 wrote:A hazard with the reliance of experimentation in the absence of a solid grounding in topical theoretical knowledge is that for the experimental findings to be valid / beneficial, it may be necessary to put them in the context of the constraints and limitations of the experimental conditions
.
As an extreme example of the usefulness of theoretical understanding of the situation, one of my favorite notes in a scifi book was the following:
"Imagine the results if one of your most well educated, enlightened scientists from the late 1800s or early 1900s were placed in the control room of a functioning nuclear reactor."
IMHO, experimentation is absolutely critical in getting the artistically perfect sounds you hear in your head to come out of an amplifier. But knowing some theory will save you incredible amounts or time by letting you know which way to go to get there.
In either case, learn all you can!!
Sorry for the rant. I obviously have a bug about trying to understand things. But then I'm a technician, not an artist.
Can I make a guess that most amp builders are not willing to share this secret?
