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The Online Guitar Store - The Audiophile's Project Sourcebook: 80 High-Performance Audio Electronics Projects

List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $19.77
Your Save: $ 10.18 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics

Average Customer Rating:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 621.3893
EAN: 9780071379298
ISBN: 0071379290
Label: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 361
Publication Date: 2001-10-30
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics
Studio: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics

Related Items
High-Power Audio Amplifier Construction Manual Designing, Building, and Testing Your Own Speaker System with Projects Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook, Fourth Edition Building Valve Amplifiers Tab Electronics Guide to Understanding Electricity and Electronics

Editorial Reviews:

THE AUDIOPHILE'S PROJECT SOURCEBOOK

Build audio projects that produce great sound for far less than they cost in the store, with audio hobbyists' favorite writer Randy Slone. In The Audiophile's Project Sourcebook, Slone gives you--

* Clear, illustrated schematics and instructions for high-quality, high-power electronic audio components that you can build at home

* Carefully constructed designs for virtually all standard high-end audio projects, backed by an author who answers his email

* 8 power-amp designs that suit virtually any need

* Instructions for making your own inexpensive testing equipment

* Comprehensible explanations of the electronics at work in the projects you want to construct, spiced with humor and insight into the electronics hobbyist's process

* Complete parts lists

"The Audiophile's Project Sourcebook" is devoid of the hype, superstition, myths, and expensive fanaticism often associated with 'high-end' audio systems. It provides straightforward help in building and understanding top quality audio electronic projects that are based on solid science and produce fantastic sound!

THE PROJECTS YOU WANT, FOR LESS

Balanced input driver/receiver circuits

Signal conditioning techniques

Voltage amplifiers

Preamps for home and stage

Tone controls

Passive and active filters

Parametric filters

Graphic equalizers

Bi-amping and tri-amping filters

Headphone amplifiers

Power amplifiers

Speaker protection systems

Clip detection circuits

Power supplies

Delay circuits

Level indicators

Homemade test equipment

Spotlight customer reviews:

Customer Rating:

Summary: First-rate resource for the budding DIY audio enthusiast
Comment: Slone covers a wide range of audio projects in this book: amplifiers, preamplifiers, filters, and protection circuits. The reader is assumed to understand basic electronics terminology, but everything else is explained point by point. An easy-to-read format supplies just enough theory for understanding the circuit, then goes right to the practical application. Slone even provides 1:1 scale artwork of numerous designs for those who want to etch their own circuit boards. For those wanting to go deeper into amplifier theory than what is presented here, this book is an execllent companion for Slone's in-depth treatment of the subject, the High-Power Audio Amplifier Construction Manual.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Meh-
Comment: I've seen better high end audio books. I'm certainly not a member of the aforementioned "Scientific School of Audio System Performance Analysis", the only instruments that can accurately measure sound quality are the ones on either side of your head. I listen to what my ears tell me sounds good, and generally, tubes sound good. Which is why this book is sort of a disappointment, you'd think that out of 80 projects there'd be at least one tube phono preamp, but unfortunately there are no tube amps, just a few rants about how tubes don't produce enough power. Who uses more than a watt anyway? Even the transistor amps presented aren't much better than what you could get from Rex or Circuit City, similar schematics could probably be found on the internet for free. Go ahead and buy it if that's the sort of thing you're into, but if its tubes you want, try Morgan Jones' "Building Valve Amplifiers", it doesn't have many schematics but it covers in great detail the layout and contruction of tube amps. Good schematics can be found on the intarnub.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Tubes rule. Slone drools.
Comment: A good deal of this book is an attack on esoteric audio in general and vacuum tube equipment in particular. But just because Mr. Slone hates tubes (and he does, although he can't be honest with himself, like most fundies, and so has to attempt to disguise his real motives) doesn't change reality. Measurements aside, all other things being equal, tube equipment generally sounds better.

If you listen to good music at normal volume, in a normal house, the average power output of your amplifier is almost always between 10 and 500 milliwatts. You can prove this with a DMM that has at least a 20 kHz AC bandwidth and peak and averaging functions hooked across your speaker. The Class B Lin topology solid state amplifier with large amounts of global NFB, which Slone describes and advocates to the exclusion of all others, does very well at between 5 and 100 percent of its rated power, but is terrible at between .01 and 1 to 2 percent of rated power.

There are various circuits to work around the problem, but Slone ignores them. When you refuse to accept the problem, you can't be part of the solution.

There are several possible solutions. One is the venerable transformer coupled vacuum tube amplifier, which for all its technical flaws, does reproduce music beautifully. There are modern tube amps that are universally acknowledged to sound great, have long tube life (in the tens of thousands of hours) and have distortion measurements in the same class as most solid state amplifiers. There are also solid state amplifiers that use innovative circuits and careful device matching-semiconductors are inherently much more variable in device parameters than tubes, which Slone conveniently forgets to tell you-to "give good first watt" while still providing peak power reserves traditionally associated with solid state designs.

I have heard an amplifier built to Slone's schematic on Slone's PCBs-in fact I set it up on my company's distortion analyzer after hours-and it meets his published specs fully. Hooked to my Klipsch LaScalas it has all the sonic elegance of a Peavey CS-400 I happened to have on hand-it makes Blossom Dearie sound suspiciously like Louis Armstrong on her quietest passages, and Angel Romero sounds like Dick Dale is doubling up on his thumb lines in the distance.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Twaddle, stuff, and nonsense
Comment: Basically this whole book is the effort of a hayseed electronics vendor to peddle his own kits of plain vanilla grade stereo equipment. With skilled electronic assemblers in America getting $8.30/hr (and equally skilled Asians getting that per day!) and components in hobby quantities bringing a 50 to 500 percent premium over what commercial buyers pay even in 100 piece quantities, he claims a hobbyist can better commercial grade designs in his hobby workshop cheaper.

This reminds me of Fred Willard's character in the excellent film, "A Mighty Wind". One of his catchphrases-"I Don't Think So!"-applies here.

These amp designs, apparently mostly from Douglas Self's books, are nothing special or unique: as someone else pointed out, if they were, there would be dozens of amplifiers of "Slone type" sold ,just as many companies made "Williamson style" amplifiers, without compensating DTN Williamson, during the early postwar hi-fi era.

About the only justification for homebrewing audio amps is to get a design offered commercially only as a "high end" piece at huge expense (and gross margin) or not at all. You can get an education, perhaps, but a breadboard project of a couple watts can give you that, and besides, audio amp design isn't exactly in big demand: the websites of High End, pro, and mainstream audio equipment manufacturers list continuing job vacancies for DSP software engineers but never analog designers.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Amplifiers and More
Comment: I bought this book after my great experience with Slone's High Power Audio Amplifier Construction Manual. This is a fantastic book if you want to build your own amplifier "accessories", such as headphone amps, preamps, equalizers, and other types of signal processing devices. There is an interesting circuit for a phase-linear filter, which I built and works beautifully. It splits the audio signal up between the pre-amp and power amp into low, midrange, and high frequency spectrums. This avoids the phase shifts associated with conventional speaker crossover networks.
You'll need a power amp for each frequency spectrum, but that's no problem. You'll have so much fun building your own amps that you'll have plenty of them laying around. The resulting sound is absolutely fantastic.

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