I don't want offend anybody here by no means, but any books by Gerald Weber should not be used as a souce for knowledge. While there are some topics and ideas in his books that are credible, most information is not. This is only my opinion.
Kevin O'Conner's books are ideally the best overall. But you can't just buy one or two volumes. He leaves you hanging on purpose in order to sell the next volume to you. It will be very expensive to have all 5 volumes. Especially Vol 4!!! ouch....
But as Structo said
If you don't have any background in electronics you should maybe get a book on basic electronic theory.
Without that you will be lost as a goose in a hail storm.
On the subject of books, did Ken Fischer ever publish anything on the troubleshooting method he developed at Ampeg?
How about any other really good troubleshooting books?
Dave Funk's book is well structured, clearly written and comprises the essence of vintage tube amps.
Kevin O'Connor's TUT series offer a wealth of insights, part theoretical, part practical, but highly coloured by O'Connor's personal preferences in combination with taking pride in his nationality. His deep explanations including non-recommended approaches offer a lot to learn, help to avoid mistakes, but also make extracting desired know-how a bit tiring.
Nothing against Hammond transformers for being accessible and affordable, but we have much better choices which O'Connor ignores. Kevin finds EL34s to be an inferior tube type. He sees design weaknesses most everywhere and - of course - always knows how to imprive everything, including designs that wrote music history. His volumes refer to each other and sometimes include corrections to assumptions in prior volumes (not issues!), but are not integrated in an explicit systems approach.
Bottom line: the TUT volumes offer much, partially too much, partially not accessible, practical and objective enough. Check out Vol. 1, the orig. TUT first.
Jack Wright wrote:On the subject of books, did Ken Fischer ever publish anything on the troubleshooting method he developed at Ampeg?
How about any other really good troubleshooting books?
He once did a column in Vintage Guitar Magazine, perhaps something could be found there.Only other thing in print I can think of would be the Train Wreck pages .
The Jack Darr stuff is good for general repair info. Andy mentioned Norman H. Crowhurst, I bet you would probably get more out of basic audio vol 2 ,has some good transformer info.
