Small Signal Audio Design

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.

1. The basics 2. Passive components 3. Designing with discrete transistors 4. Opamps and their properties 5. Opamps for low voltages 6. Filters 7. Preamplifier architectures 8. Variable gain stages 9. Moving-magnet inputs: levels and RIAA equalisation 10. Moving-coil phono amplifiers 11. Tape replay amps 12. Guitar preamplifiers 13. Volume controls 14. Balance controls 15. Tone controls and equalisers 16. Mixer architectures 17. Microphone preamplifiers 18. Line inputs 19. Line outputs 20. Headphone amplifiers 21. Signal switching 22. Mixer sub-systems 23. Level indication and metering 24. Level control and special circuits 25. Power supplies 26. Interfacing with the digital domain 27. Design and experimentation