Preface

This book has had two previous incarnations. It first appeared in 1994 under the heading of Audio Recording and Reproduction: Practical Measures for Audio Enthusiasts. Gratifyingly, only three years later, there was a need for a second edition and the publishers, feeling quite rightly that the original title was rather cumbersome, suggested a new title and a revision of the whole book. It then appeared as Audio Explained.

The aim of the original was to make it easier for people without professional equipment to make recordings of a very respectable standard for whatever purpose – I suggested conductors of amateur choirs or orchestras, teachers who needed to develop their own audio-visual material, members of drama groups, and so on. I also had in mind for the potential readership the large number of people who are interested in how their hi-fi equipment works and also those with camcorders who want to edit their work and enhance it with slightly better and possibly more ambitious sound!

Then, more recently, it appeared that Audio Explained came near to being appropriate for students doing the City and Guilds Sound Engineering 1820 Course. So, it's been thoroughly revised, updated and generally (I hope) improved so that it caters for these students as well.

I'd like to think, though, that it's still useful to the original targets.

I've worked throughout on my very firmly held conviction that a degree of understanding of the basic principles is essential. To help do that and still make the book reasonably readable, most chapters are in two parts. The first part of a chapter should be easy reading for any interested person, no matter how slight their previous knowledge. The second part deals with the topic in a little more depth, but again no great technical knowledge is needed.

The intentions therefore are threefold:

1.   To be a useful guide to the non-professional practitioner

2.   To explain as far as possible in a non-technical way how modern audio works

3.   To be useful to serious students of sound technology.

Michael Talbot-Smith