Amplifier projects but not good design: a cookbook


This is a smaller and more project-oriented version of this author's
earlier book on building solid-state audio amplifiers. The amplifiers
in this book are "plain vanilla" Class B direct-coupled transistor
amplifiers, which will provide reasonable performance for utility or
musical instrument use, but due to the lack of precision-matching of
semiconductors and the "more-is-better" approach to using NFB, these
are not going to compete in sound with Krell or Threshold. It's
delusional to think otherwise.
Rather than a clean sheet of paper engineering effort walking the
reader through all aspects of these designs, this is basically a
presentation of a completed design as "the one true amp". I believe
this author basically cookbooked these himself from works by Hood and
others.

More effort is made in this volume to explain the etching of printed
circuit boards. It's my belief that this is inherently an unpleasant
and messy task and that the PCB era coincided with the near-death of
hobby electronics in the U.S. for precisely that reason: much of the
renaissance in audio hobbyist equipment building is soley due to the
re-popularization of vacuum tube amplifiers built using 1950s
techniques. (No ferric chloride involved.)

Personally, I think this type of amplifier is more effectively bought
than built today, but if what he has is what you want, it will
probably work reasonably well and is at least built from common parts.
Don't delude yourself that these are truly a high-end product: compare
them to mass-production amplifiers costing a little more than the
retail price of all the parts and you won't be disappointed.