Todd Sharp is surrounded by a mountain of guitar amps. But he’s quick to say some of them are better than others. “That’s kind of my motto here: Life is too short to play shitty amps,” he said with a ...

The tubes you’ll find in guitar amps and high-end stereos were first designed in the 30s and 40s, and when you get to really, really advanced tube technology you’d be looking at extremely small tubes ...

“You should have used a 555” has become a bit of a meme around these parts lately, and for good reason. There seems to be little that these ubiquitous chips can’t be used for, and in a world where ...

Talking about vacuum tubes—or “vacuum electron devices” (VEDs), as their proponents prefer to call them—may seem like you are discussing ancient history. After all, who even considers VEDs when ...

Millimeter wave vacuum tubes, including ones like the traveling wave tube (TWT) depicted here, amplify signals by exchanging kinetic energy in the electron beam (shown as a blue line) with ...

Older table-top AC-DC radios used a classic line-up of tubes. Think 12SA7, 12SK7,12SQ7, 35Z5GT, and 50L6GT. As I grew into my teens, I got interested in how these radios worked and soon discovered ...