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Book Review: High-Power Audio Amplifier Construction Manual, Randy Slone
Poor attempt to slag High End audio dominates stinky book
This book is not a systematic or comprehensive guide to anything. It's a two part collection of the author's dislike for High End audio, and the people that build it, the people that buy it: and a semi-coherent collection of designs he favors which he seems to have cobbled up from Doug Self and Ben Duncan books, commercial PA/MI designs he has probably serviced, and 70s and 80s semiconductor app manuals. Want to build a solid state amp for quality domestic listening? Look at designs by Borbely, Pass, Thagard, and other authors in Audio Amateur/AudioXPress or Elektor magazines. Slone's amp will work, in fact it will provide reasonable efficiency and measure pretty well (though nowhere near as well as a McIntosh, if you want to impress friends with a HP 339 and a dummy load), but it will sound just like all the Class B high feedback inexpensive amps, whether marketed for home or pro use. Listen in a quiet room through good efficient speakers to quiet passages in good music, well recorded, and despite what the aforementioned HP 339-or 8903 or AP or Potomac or (yecch) Sound Tech box- says, an eight watt WE 300B amp with choke filtered plate supply and oil caps will make it sound dull, lifeless, and wrong. Is one better than another? Horses for courses! Is either one really good compared to what's possible? Not really. But Slone is either too deaf or stubborn to understand. And that's why this book basically stinks. My advice is let it smell up someone else's bookshelf, as with most other lame, ill-edited TAB titles. |
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