Paul, thanks for writing your personal opinion and including 10 lines
to actually comment on the book itself.

some projects with PCB artwork but little design explanation

I have read the book from cover to cover and every facet of
every project design is described in great detail, although not
on a per-project basis.

Sure, he has a tendency towards increased complexity to achieve
extremely low distortion figures, and presents some power amps which are
more suited to PA or instrument amplification, but I found the book to
be
quite lucid.

I won't be building any of his amps for hi-fi purposes, but it
was an interesting read. It is mostly in obeyance with the respected
work of
audio guru Douglas Self.

Glenn.

Paul wrote:
Ignoble heir to a proud tradition


The history of serious audio amplification-'serious' meaning a
concerted effort to achieve fidelity even when mainstream thought held
it superfluous-is unusual because, even more so than in Amateur Radio
(hams quit building, except for purposely crude and simplistic QRP
equipment,in the late sixties for the most part), it has been largely
driven by hardcore, soldering-iron-wielding hobbyists. From concert
violinist David Sarser to astronaut Norman Thagard, there's a big
tradition of bright people wholly outside their discipline plowing new
design ground and publishing their results, along with more
conventional engineers and technicians whose published works drove
first the do-it-yourself builders and then the industry at large.
Lincoln Walsh, D.T.N. and Reg Williamson-two unrelated Englishmen
twenty years apart-Hafler and Keroes, and many others founded a
tradition carried on well into the solid state era: Bongiorno's
Ampzilla was the first real stake in the heart of the tube amp's
dominance among the hot iron cognoscenti. The "tube revival"-a
misnomer because among really serious audiophiles there never was a
time where everyone agreed solid state was superior or even
acceptable-was, as a previous reviewer notes, a DIY-spearheaded effort
with the indefatiguable Ed Dell's Audio Amateur/Glass
Audio/AudioXPress magazines and later hardcore journals such as Sound
Practices and Vacuum Tube Valley publishing projects, offering parts
and describing the finished homebrews in glowing (no pun intended)
terms. By no means was solid state abandoned, but tube amplifiers have
always been more popular as homebuilt projects.

Many books have been written in the past 50 years on the building of
high fidelity equipment. This one isn't the worst, but that's no
excuse: it's certainly not very good. It's an unedited, disjointed
bunch of facts, half-truths, outright sour grapes, and willfully
misleading statements coupled to some projects with PCB artwork but
little design explanation. The designs themselves look like they are
straight out of Audio Amateur or Practical Wireless (UK) circa 1982.
Combined with the author's Howard Cosell-like writing style and total
lack of fact checking (he lists the manufacturer of Audio Precision
audio test equipment as Thurlby Thandar, a Brit company about as far
from Beaverton, Oregon as could be imagined!) he's far more likely to
provoke High Enders to chuck the book into a river than to change
their mind about anything whatsoever.

His later book is a little better, but not a lot. There are better
writers working for far better publishers with far more useful things
to say for anyone actually wanting to build an amplifier, so my advice
is to simply avoid this book in favor of several other titles. In
recent years, speakers of Japanese, German, and even French have had
more quality titles to choose from than the Anglophone press has
produced-Reiner zur Linde and Isamu Asano especially are most talked
about-but none the less, Slone is not a preffered choice in any
language.