Virtual Valve Amplifier (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A Virtual Valve Amplifier (aka. VVA) is a modern software development for simulating the sound of various valve amplifier designs that would normally consist of valves/electron-tubes. A VVA can be used to color the sound of a digital recording by adding "tube-warmth" in addition to adding subtle harmonics to enhance very old or muffled recordings. The algorithms behind a VVA are based on real vacuum tube circuits and vacuum tube non-linear device characteristics through mathematically deriving the "large-signal" transfer functions of various vacuum tubes and output transformers found in vauum tube amplifier designs. A majority of this data was originally derived from extensive bench measurements of real vacuum tube amplifier circuits under varying operating conditions by engineers Craig Maier and Rick Carlson in the early 1990s. As such, the effects of a VVA are a direct mathematical reconstruction of the same signal passing through a physical electron tube amplifier.