In manufacturers' specifications for electronic devices, a bogey device (or bogie device) - especially a vacuum tube- is one that has all characteristics equal to the published values, in other words that its parameters all lie in the centre of their bell curve distributions.[1]
A bogey is a published value for a parameter of an electronic component, such as a vacuum tube, that is average or typical of devices that will be sold, and which the device's manufacturer is attempting to achieve.[2] With manufacturing tolerances and variables in production, most devices produced do not exactly meet the bogey value for each parameter.[3]
Apart from a bogey device being a theoretical device that has the given characteristics, the term can refer to a specially-selected example of a device (e.g. from a production run where care is taken to ensure each characteristic has its nominal value); for example a bogey tube could be used to calibrate tube testers and be expected to give readings in the middle of the meter's "good" region.[3] Hence a tube can be specified by its bogey values and suitable tolerances,[4] and tests are based on the bogey values.[5] For applications such as music amplifiers where the channels need to have nearly identical performance, it is desirable that components are matched and have major parameter values close to bogey.[6]