Re: Any Kevin O'Conner books on PDF??
Posted: 20 Sep 2013, 18:57
If you want to find a bottom line for the moment:
I have all of them except the last one. They reach increasingly into power scaling, and although there are a few very useful information snippets here and there and I would not want to miss them, those are not elementary.
If I were to recommend one or two, I would recommend TUT and Principles of Power in that order. These are the first ones I bought and they are more than enought to hot-rod or modify an amp. I also bought the speaker book and made two of them very good sounding enclosures.
Leaving the money question aside, I do not regret a second buying them, although the later ones are very academic for my purposes, "good read" so to say.
I did not spot any obvious mistakes and did not find the often quoted self-indulgence too unbearable. Later issues I had the impression grew increasingly into an advertising platform for the kits they sell.
E-mail requests were responded to promptly and to the point. Until one day something must have happened where the man grew downright mad and very very impolite. No attempts to clarify the situation were fruitful. So, as I said, this well has dried out for me.
One thing I noticed, I incorporated many options into an existing tube head, just to see how they sounded. In retrospect, those were all useless.
You can hot-rod your amp into an monstrous overdrive machine that has endless controls for everything on it, tube type switching, sag, power scale, channel switching and all that and your amp will still sound the same. Those things do not make a marshal out of a fender or anything like that. Don´t let the impression mislead you.
One day I will throw out all that stuff and restore the amp to its original simplicity.
There are a lot of things you can do to make your amp more silent, eliminate design flaws that were buck-driven decisions, install an fx-loop if needed, restore it to its original force and leave the amp tonally as it is. This is a far more sensical approach IMHO.
The two books do all that and you don´t need any of the others.
He says himself that everything can be done in the signal domain (preamp) [or: my opinion: before] and then he continues pages and books worth of how you do it in the power amp. But as anybody prefers.
I will let you know how the Merlin books fits in here once I get it.
have fun
-helmut
I have all of them except the last one. They reach increasingly into power scaling, and although there are a few very useful information snippets here and there and I would not want to miss them, those are not elementary.
If I were to recommend one or two, I would recommend TUT and Principles of Power in that order. These are the first ones I bought and they are more than enought to hot-rod or modify an amp. I also bought the speaker book and made two of them very good sounding enclosures.
Leaving the money question aside, I do not regret a second buying them, although the later ones are very academic for my purposes, "good read" so to say.
I did not spot any obvious mistakes and did not find the often quoted self-indulgence too unbearable. Later issues I had the impression grew increasingly into an advertising platform for the kits they sell.
E-mail requests were responded to promptly and to the point. Until one day something must have happened where the man grew downright mad and very very impolite. No attempts to clarify the situation were fruitful. So, as I said, this well has dried out for me.
One thing I noticed, I incorporated many options into an existing tube head, just to see how they sounded. In retrospect, those were all useless.
You can hot-rod your amp into an monstrous overdrive machine that has endless controls for everything on it, tube type switching, sag, power scale, channel switching and all that and your amp will still sound the same. Those things do not make a marshal out of a fender or anything like that. Don´t let the impression mislead you.
One day I will throw out all that stuff and restore the amp to its original simplicity.
There are a lot of things you can do to make your amp more silent, eliminate design flaws that were buck-driven decisions, install an fx-loop if needed, restore it to its original force and leave the amp tonally as it is. This is a far more sensical approach IMHO.
The two books do all that and you don´t need any of the others.
He says himself that everything can be done in the signal domain (preamp) [or: my opinion: before] and then he continues pages and books worth of how you do it in the power amp. But as anybody prefers.
I will let you know how the Merlin books fits in here once I get it.
have fun
-helmut