Wes Phillips

When I picked up the mail on Saturday, I had an unexpected package. It contained Vance Dickason's Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7^th Edition. Oh boy!

When I built my first pair of loudspeakers, there wasn't anything like this comprehensive tutorial on speaker building, so I built a pair of boxes the size of the speakers I thought I'd like, went down to Allied Radio and bought the biggest woofer that would fit, a slightly smaller midrange driver, and a multi-cell horn tweeter and just cut holes in the front baffle and wired 'em up.

It sounded—of course—like the dog's breakfast. To add insult to injury, a friend listened for a second, pursed his lips, and asked, "What crossover are you using?"

Wha?

That night I added two off-the-shelf crossovers to my under-designed and actually quite dreadful speakers.

When I ran across Dickason's LDC in its second edition, I immediately recognized it as the bible I had needed before my failed foray into speaker "design." The latest edition is even better, containing tons of information on cabinets, crossovers, software, test gear, testing, and loads of specific projects you can build yourself—plus it contains a coupon redeemable for loudspeaker design software.

It's the best single volume education in loudspeakers you can buy, which makes it a stone bargain at $39.95.