Small Signal Audio Design by Douglas Self

Small Signal Audio Design by Douglas Self

Small Signal Audio Design is a highly practical handbook providing an extensive repertoire of circuits that can be assembled to make almost any type of audio system. This updated fifth edition offers new content on recent opamps, electrolytic distortion, noise in MM RIAA preamplifiers, reducing the noise in tone-control stages, balanced line inputs, and much more.

This book continues the engaging prose style familiar to readers, as you learn why mercury-filled cables are not a good idea, the pitfalls of plating gold on copper, and what quotes from Star Trek have to do with PCB design.

Learn how to:

• make amplifiers with apparently impossibly low noise
• design discrete circuitry that can handle enormous signals with vanishingly low distortion
• transform the performance of low-cost-opamps
• build active filters with very low noise and distortion while saving money on expensive capacitors
• make incredibly accurate volume controls
• make a huge variety of audio equalisers
• make magnetic cartridge preamplifiers that have noise so low it is limited by basic physics, by using load synthesis
• sum, switch, clip, compress, and route audio signals
• build simple but ultra-low noise power supplies
• be confident that phase perception is not an issue

Including all the crucial theory but with minimal mathematics, Small Signal Audio Design is the must-have companion for anyone studying, researching, or working in audio engineering and audio electronics.

Douglas Self studied engineering at Cambridge University, then psychoacoustics at Sussex University. He has spent many years working at the top level of design in both the professional audio and hi-fi industries and has taken out a number of patents in the field of audio technology. He currently acts as a consultant engineer in the field of audio design.