New to DIY Audio - need orientation
 

Hi there, Im totally new to DIY audio and are looking for a good introductory book and a project to get me started. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Hello agold and welcome aboard. One suggestion might be to go to the appropriate forum and ask about each project you might be interested in there.

Good luck.

A good book in general is the loudspeaker design cookbook. A good first amplifier project is a gainclone kit like the one on audiosector.com

Hope this helps and welcome!

Thanks for the suggestions. I will attempt a gain clone as first kit

Horowitz & Hill "The Art Of Electronics"

very very easy to read, and more than you ever wanted to know...

_-_-bear

PS. you did not say if you had *any* electronics experience or not? If not, then suggest building a low buck kit from any one of the commercial suppliers that consists of a small pcb and a bag of parts - things like flashers, small amplifiers, stuff like that. To make sure you are ok with at least that level of basic soldering and parts identification, orientation.

Thanks for the suggestions. I have almost no hands on electronics experience, although I know some of the theory from my college days (I'm a physicist by training).

Any other easy chipamp kits to start with? I looked at the one kctess5 suggested, and might attempt that.

Regards,

-A

Hi ;-)

Just saw your thread passing by... If I were more or less entirely new to electronics I would also consider buying the basic tools to work with electronics. A multimeter, the pliers (if that is the name of the tools to hold and cut things), a quite reasonable soldering iron, solder etc. And maybe also consider where I wished to go with it: Is it just for casual fun or would you like to build e.g. very good amplifiers or ..?

It might give a direction in how & where to start out.

Best regards,

Jesper

If you really want a simple step by step chip amp to start with, you might want to consider the Makezine Chipamp (Google search it). It is low cost ($50 or so), step by step with lots of visuals, sounds pretty good for things that you can get mostly from Radio Shack, a case made by shopping at Home Depot, and eBay'ing the LM1875 chips needed for this.

I have made two people get bitten by the bug with this project and you get some practice with soldering too. It isn't sonically superior to some of the other amps, but is definitely cheap, fun, easy to source parts, and interesting.

I understand that there are copies of the issue/magazine where all the details is laid out in easy to follow picture form on the Internet but that requires downloading copyrighted content... Otherwise you can see if there are any back issues in your library or something where the print article details the same.

The other thing you can do is wait for the Nelson Pass Amp Camp Amp kit to come out interest diyaudio store. It. Looks simple and elegant, plus it is running class A solid state with very few exotic parts (special order or expensive). And it will be reasonably priced and support the diyaudio website when you buy it here from my understanding.

Good luck!

Otab