Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 8th Edition- 2 Volume Set

Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 8th Edition- 2 Volume Set- 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.

Volume I: Full color
Book Size:  8.5" x 11"
Page Count: 398

Volume II: Black and White
Book Size:  8.5" x 11"
Page Count: 128

Vance Dickason’s Loudspeaker Design Cookbook has been in publication for 46 years, from its humble self published spiral bound first two editions in 1977 and 1978 to the next five editions (the 3rd thru the 7th ) released by AAP (Audio Amateur Publications) from 1987 to 2006 plus all the foreign editions released over the years in French, Dutch,German, Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese.

Now in 2023 KCK Media has released what is by far the best LDC edition yet, the 8th Edition of the Loudspeaker Design Cookbook. This book has gone from the 53 page spiral bound 1st edition in 1977, to the soft bound 275 page 7th Edition in 2006, to the new 351 page full color hardbound and softbound 8th Edition! In terms of content, two chapters were deleted from LDC7 and four new chapters were added, plus two other chapters from LDC7 were radically revised, making LDC8 a substantially new book.

The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook has everything you need to know to build that dream loudspeaker system for your home, your car, or your new home theater, but thought you couldn't afford.

It shows easy ways to pick exactly the right parts, boxes and pleasing finish as well as the correct way to feed your music to your new, superb loudspeaker system. Contains proven designs, a world of the best sources, and easy ways to test the results for yourself.

Vance Dickason has updated his classic text for loudspeaker builders at all levels of experience and expertise. A significant aspect of LDC8 is that it not only tells you the most recent hardware and software you can use to provide shortcuts to great performance, but it also continues to include information from early versions that teach the formulas for hand calculations and practical techniques so one can really understand the underlying principles that are involved to get a true feel for the process of developing high performance loudspeaker systems. Now with version 8 of LCD, Vance has taken the book to a new level of exploring unique advanced issues and includes up to date information on deep acoustical subjects. The latest version also includes useful, hands on, advanced and practical information that you will not learn at any university.

New for the EIGHTH EDITION

• 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