Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116074 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 223 pages

About the Author
David B. Weems is an acknowledged expert in speaker systems and speaker enclosures. He has written several books, including all four editions of Designing, Building, and Testing Your Own Speaker Systems—with Projects and the first edition of this volume. Weems also has contributed numerous articles on speaker systems to such widely read electronics publications as Audio, High Fidelity, Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, and Speaker Builder. G. R. Koonce is a member of the Audio Engineering Society and contributes many articles to Speaker Builder magazine.

Customer Reviews

Just what I wanted
This book was well worth the money! I was struggling to find someone who could explain to me what all the 'letters' mean in speaker design, and how that translates into a specific size of box.
The author of this book takes great care to fully explain the meaning of the different elements and how they all relate to each other.

The only negative point I can make is that this book only focuses on Closed-Box and Ported speaker designs. Other types (Band-pass, Horn Loaded, Transmission Line, etc) are mentioned, but there's no real information to help you design one.
Given that 99% of speakers are either Closed-Box or Ported, this is not really a big issue.

Designing building and testing your own loudspeaker system
I bought this because it was on offer with my book of choice, and after a browse became aware of some stark errors in it. In addition the style of written English, as is often the case, reveals a sloppiness of thought; a lack of precision and rigour in the thought processes themselves. The resultant cognitive dissonance has made it difficult and tiresome to read even though it undoubtedly has some value in it. Sometimes several readings of a sentence are necessary in order to try to grasp a point, and this is due to the imprecision of expression rather than the complexity of the matter being dealt with.

Very Little Useful Technical Detail
While the book has designs which probably work nicely (I have not constructed any) I was hoping to find a dissemination of the AES Journal papers by Small, Thiele and possibly Olson also. However the technical literature is not mentioned much at all. There isn't much teaching in this book. The author gives design tables and so forth with little explanation as to how they were produced or the physical processes that they arise from. In this respect the book is very disappointing. If however you are looking for a 'cookbook' to follow, then this is a good example with nice diagrams and copious detail on construction.

If you also seek a technical appraisal of the design of loudspeaker enclosures try the loudspeaker design cookbook (presently 7th Ed.) by Vance Dickason. While I have read Weams twice, (the second time just to make sure that I couldn't find what I was hoping for) every time I work on loudspeakers LDC will not be far away.

James