Focal Press has just released the second edition of Small Signal Audio Design by Douglas Self, providing ample coverage of preamplifiers and mixers, as well as a new chapter on headphone amplifiers. The handbook provides an extensive repertoire of circuits that can be put together to make almost any type of audio system.
Essential points of theory that bear on practical performance are lucidly and thoroughly explained, with the mathematics kept to a relative minimum. Self’s background in design for manufacture means that he keeps a wary eye on the cost of things. The book also includes a chapter on power-supplies, full of practical ways to keep both the ripple and the cost down, showing how to power everything.
The book also teaches how to:
—Make amplifiers with apparently impossibly low noise
—Design discrete circuitry that can handle enormous signals with vanishingly low distortion
—Use humble low-gain transistors to make an amplifier with an input impedance of more than 50 Megohms
—Transform the performance of low-cost-opamps, how to make filters with very low noise and distortion
—Make incredibly accurate volume controls
—Make a huge variety of audio equalizers
—Make magnetic cartridge preamplifiers that have noise so low it is limited by basic physics
—Sum, switch, clip, compress, and route audio signals
The second edition is expanded throughout (with added information on new ADCs and DACs, microcontrollers, more coverage of discrete op amp design, and many other topics), and includes a completely new chapter on headphone amplifiers.
Author 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.
Find out more and get Small Signal Audio Design, 2nd Edition here.
