Two Volume Set - 8th Edition

THE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR BOOK
ON LOUDSPEAKER DESIGN!

For the first time ever available in Full Color (Volume 1)
and a Hardcover Collector's Edition

By Vance Dickason

Order the set and save $35! $159.95 Hardcover Set - $129.95 Paperback Set
NOTICE: International Buyers you may be eligible for a
shipping discount enter code -20SHIP at checkout

Hardcover edition is regularly going out of stock
and may take several weeks to ship

Volume I: Full color
Book Size:  8.5" x 11"
Page Count: 398
Retail Price: $149 Hardcover - $124 Softbound

Volume II: Black and White
Book Size:  8.5" x 11"
Page Count: 128
Retail Price: $45.95 Hardcover - $35.95 Softbound

Vance Dickason's top-selling Loudspeaker Design Cookbook is an essential must-read for serious speaker designers, audio engineers, and anyone looking to master speaker-building technology.

New for the EIGHTH EDITION - Volume I

• New Chapter 8 — “Loudspeaker Testing” has been substantially revised and includes specifics on the Fixed Mmd method for calculating cone assembly mass, a more complete definition of acoustic phase, an updated list of computer based TSP (Thiele Small Parameters) measurement hardware, plus a discussion of the various types of loudspeaker measurements and how they relate to driver quality and system design integrity.

• New Chapter 9 — “Computer Based Tools for Loudspeaker Development” has been completely revised to include current offerings of computer based loudspeaker measurement analyzers, as well as loudspeaker enclosure and crossover simulation software.

• New Chapter 10 — “Room Measurement Equipment and Room Correction Solutions”, and includes a survey of room measurement analyzers, plus a discussion on room acoustics, room treatment and digital room correction devices.

• New Chapter 12 — “Home Theater Loudspeakers” and has been extensively revised, including details on Dolby Atmos and Immersive Audio.

• New Chapter 13 — “Studio Monitor Loudspeakers”. This new chapter explores the difference between HIFI loudspeakers and studio monitors, professional criteria for studio monitor design, the constant directivity aspect of studio monitors, and a dissertation on zero phase in studio monitors.

• New Chapter 14 — “Hybrid Loudspeakers”. This exciting new chapter explores the subject of hybrid active/passive and digital/analog loudspeaker development and includes a tutorial design example for an ultra high-end hybrid monitor loudspeaker.  

 Volume II

Back in 1993, before my second book Loudspeaker Recipes Book 1 was published, I had a completely different concept of what the book would become. My intention at the time was to produce two intensive computer aided design tutorial books that would take a deep dive into the “inner game” of passive crossover design. These two new books would become the Loudspeaker Design Cookbook Volume II for two-way network design, and Volume III for three-way network design. Following thru with this goal, I designed and built four two-way designs, the ones that are featured in the original printing of Loudspeaker Recipes Book 1, but I also designed and built four three-way designs intended to be the body of the second new book, Loudspeaker Design Cookbook Volume III.

Sadly authors, like musicians don’t always have creative control over their work. As the staff at Audio Amateur, my publisher at the time, were putting the Volume II tutorial together, they decided that it would be clever to title the new book “Loudspeaker Recipes”, to go with the “Cookbook” theme of the “Loudspeaker Design Cookbook Volume II” title, which at this time was the very successful 4th Edition published in 1991. Obviously, my publisher had in mind marketing the book as a DIY kit book, not as an engineering tutorial as I had explicitly intended. For this and other reasons, I canceled the second three-way design tutorial project.

Regrettably, Loudspeaker Recipes went out of print in 2015, when it was discovered that the original Compugraphic phototypeset sheets (the way books were printed in 1994 before PDF printing was available) had never been transferred from Audio Amateur Corp. to the current publisher, KCK Media Corp. The fact remains, however, that Loudspeaker Recipes was in many ways a more important and instructionally valuable than the LDC in terms of two-way crossover design. LDC has the all the really important crossover design theory and practice, but for two-way network design, Loudspeaker Recipes was the truly the advanced course. I mentioned that at a trade show shortly after LDC7 was published to the chief engineer of one the most respected and successful high-end two-channel speaker companies in the world, and this gentleman emphatically agreed with me.

As I was putting the finishing touches on LDC8, I made the decision to recue what I consider was a important resource to anyone interested in learning professional passive 2-way crossover network design. While some of the information regarding analyzers and drivers is certainly outdated and no longer available (no confusing it with a kit book now!), the advanced concepts behind network design are as valid today as when I wrote the book in 1994. As originally intended, “Loudspeaker Recipes Book 1” has been re-titled to “The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook Volume II” for the second printing. I have also committed to producing a third book, a three-way passive crossover design tutorial, which also as originally planned, will be “The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook Volume III”.

What follows is a high quality scan of the original Loudspeaker Recipes Book 1. While perfectly readable, it is not perfect. Regardless, this was only way to preserve this valuable work, so apologies for the imperfections.

Vance Dickason