enlighten me please

[bnwitt]

One of the conditions controlling gain in a triode is the ratio of the cathode resistor to the plate resistor. You can change both equally and maintain the same gain. If you change one and not the other you will alter the gain of the triode. by just changing the cathode resistor and not the plate resistor you are changing gain.

Kevin O'Connor's TUT 5 chapter one is an excellent source of information on the triode voltage amp.

[iknowjohnny]

I'm pretty noob when it comes to understanding how amp circuits work, but i do understand gain. Gain is nothing more than the amount of signal, but is not distortion or clipping. It CAUSES clipping/distortion when it's driven into another stage to a level the stage cannot handle cleanly. One only needs to be a player who has experimented with gain staging to understand that.

[bnwitt]

specifically, gain is the ratio of input signal to output signal