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.

Preface

Scientia potentia est

“Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

Attributed to Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in 1781 upon receiving the second volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from its author.

This book deals with small-signal audio design, the amplification and control of audio in the analogue domain, where the processing is done with opamps or discrete transistors, usually working at a nominal level of a volt or less. It constitutes a major update of the fourth edition. “Small-signal design” is the opposite term to “large-signal design,” which in audio represents power amplifiers driving loudspeakers rather than the electricity distribution grid or lightning.

The publication of Electronics for Vinyl (EFV) in 2018 allowed the vinyl-oriented material in this book to be much reduced, freeing space for more new material. All the phono material that was in the second and third editions of Small Signal Audio Design is in Electronics for Vinyl, plus a great deal more. Therefore the chapters on moving-magnet inputs have been reduced to one (Chapter 9); this cannot give comprehensive coverage of a very big subject, but it does give the most important information, with many pointers to where very much more can be found in Electronics for Vinyl. Chapter 9 also contains new information that has been acquired since EFV was written.