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Why a New Program?
Prior to the arrival of this program, only three ways realistically presented themselves to the designing of a single-ended amplifier. The first was to break out old tube manuals (yes, "old" and "tube manual" together is redundant), textbooks, ruler, calculator, and lots of scratch paper. The second was just to break out the soldering iron and build and test and change components and test until your design was vindicated or proven undesirable. The third way was both the most high tech and the least realizable for most amateur constructors--namely, learn to use one of the many variations of SPICE and try to model the output tube and transformer as well as you could to get a fair idea of how the proposed amplifier would work in practice. Admittedly, although this approach required the biggest investment of time and intellectual energy, it held and still holds the greatest potential for revealing the unique behavior of a specific tube working with a specific transformer in a time domain analysis. However, as no SPICE triode model comes close to being as accurate as the True Curves mathematical model used in SE Amp CAD, let alone a program-specific to SE amplifier design, SE Amp CAD is the quickest, easiest way to model, evaluate, and understand a tube single-ended output stage.
Why does it just cover SE Amplifiers?
Why does SE Amp Cad just cover tube single-ended output stages and not transistor or push-pull stages? And why not input stages while you are at it? The answer is the same as why a home finance budget program doesn't do Macaulay's duration of a cash flow stream: the more universal a program, the less useful it will be to most people. SE Amp CAD's only concern is single-ended tube output stages and is only useful to those who want to understand and design single-ended amplifiers, but it is very useful to them indeed. It displays all the output data results, the output circuit schematic, the tube's plate curves, the input signal and the resulting output signal--all interactively.
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