High Voltage Hacks: A 1000 Watt tube amp

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Normally when we hear of a Champ guitar amp, we think of a sweet-sounding rig that puts out 6 Watts through an 8-inch speaker. [John Chambers] of Champ Electronics wanted to build a true champion for the field of battle and came up with The Champ 1000 Watt Tube Amp, an amplifier that probably puts out enough heat to keep an igloo warm. The amp is based on 807 valves. With some clever … [Read more...]

Tube amp monitor

Sparkfun contributor [Pete] really loves tube amps, but he's a very safety-conscious guy who doesn't like being electrocuted. This is a problem, since tube amps are usually very high voltage, and a small mistake can be fatal. To deal with this voltage issue, he built a tube amp with a control system built around a 6DOF v3 controller board. The control system is there mainly in case of a failure, … [Read more...]

Multiband Nixie VU meter

This VU meter project by [Daniel Naito] is a great piece of Russian electrocouture. It's made up of 14 Nixie tubes that display seven frequency bands for the two audio channels. He found this similar project, but wanted to keep the cost low by avoiding such exotic ICs. First, the two input channels are amplified and then split using seven bandpass filters covering 60, 150, 400, 1000, 2500, 6000, … [Read more...]

Nixie tube VU meter

[Daniel] sent in his Nixie tube VU meter. It uses 14 Russian IN-13 Nixie bar-graph tubes. He built a custom circuit to amplify, filter, smooth and feed a voltage divider to assign signal levels to segments and finally some high voltage transistors to drive the tubes. The circuit looks pretty big, but it's repeated for each tube - so he worked hard to keep the cost down as much as possible. Now … [Read more...]

Tiny Oscilloscope

This little o-scope is built entirely using valves (tubes), built by [Ian Wilson] and [Hans Summers]. [Hans]' site covers everything from monitor gutting to a Z80 viscometer, it's worth taking some time to poke around. Thanks to [Elliot] for sending in this one on the tips line. … [Read more...]