The Audiophile’s Project Sourcebook: 80 High-Performance Audio Electronics Projects
- ISBN13: 9780071379298
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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… More >>
The Audiophile’s Project Sourcebook: 80 High-Performance Audio Electronics Projects
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.
Rating: 1 / 5
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.
Rating: 2 / 5
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.
Rating: 1 / 5
I think Mr Slone is basically an electronics nerd who hates High End audio because it costs money and involves people who are trendy and fashionable and often buy it for pristege.
At hamfests and swap meets, you meet these guys all the time.I have been building High End audio equipment and restoring vintage pieces for thirty years. I still go to these affairs, but the good stuff is almost all gone, except for test equipment, and even that’s getting lean.
He’s completely wrong about just about everything when it comes to the serious home reproduction of quality music-music with real dynamic range and bandwidth. They are also twenty or so years out of phase with serious studio listening-mixdown and mastering in the best studios and mastering facilities. They do, however, make sense in the world of sound reinforcement in clubs, houses of worship (HOW, in audio-contractor-speak) and for musical instruments except electric guitar. These are high duty cycle applications where considerations important in high end domestic service don’t matter.
He talks smack about many things that have unquestionably proven good in high end audio-autoformer-coupled outputs, linear regulated rails, and Class AB operation-and makes snotty and spiteful comments about tube equipment rather than looking at the real issue-how is it that equipment that measures so bad _in some cases_ can give such good sonic results? And in fact, some of the tube equipment out there measures very, very well.
The designs in this book probably will work fine if you really want to build one, although I’m sure they are not his original work except in detail. So I can’t condemn the book completely. But they are not terribly good for home listening unless you have really inefficient, but benignly load-presenting speakers and play music with limited dynamic range or at high SPL all the time. If that’s what you like, fine, but you are wasting your money on high end equipment anyway: inexpensive PA gear will do as well.
Rating: 2 / 5
Randy has done a wonderful job of compiling a tremendous amount of information and high quality schematics in one book. “Source” in the title of this book is apply named. I thoroughly enjoy the nearly A-Z coverage of Audio circuits and the high degree of common sense descriptions that go along with them. If you are an Audio Hobbiest, then you should not be with out this book.
Rating: 5 / 5