Customer Reviews

Theory & Design of Loudspeaker Enclosures

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Benson's book provides a rich background in the fundamental physics of loudspeaker design. However, this book is NOT for the hobbiest! To truly appreciate his writing, the reader should, by necessity, have a solid background in physics, mathematics, or engineering. Unlike the other oversimplified "how-to" cookbook speaker design books, this tome presents the operational theory such that a skilled designer can create a "from scratch design", instead of merely cutting and pasting an existing design. Other books should be subtitled "Loudspeaker Building", this books can truly be labeled as loudspeaker design!

This book is an edited collection of technical papers of various aspects of cabinet design, which does not attempt to speak to the novice enclosure builder. This is not a "how to" book, but rather a step by step documentation of the math behind cabinet design. Most of the book is algebraic expressions relating design parameters. The reader is expected to already understand mathematical fundamentals of several common speaker designs, and he who does not would be better off starting with a more fundamental approach. A "rating" of this book is innapropriate, because it is a technical report. The 5 star rating is because reviews are not accepted without ratings, and far be it from me to find any fault with these 200+ pages of math.

Based on the blurb advertising this book, I bought it to help me design and build my home loudspeakers. It is NOT this type of book. Full of mathematics it is perfect for the experts but will not help the common hobbyist like me to decide how to size and build speaker enclosures.

I was disappointed to find that this book was nothing but higher order mathematics with "equivalent" models. I had hoped to find useful, easy to understand text with some illustrations about driver considerations, cone and baffle design, crossover design and modeling- everything for an experienced hobbist to quickly get up to speed about speaker design. This book is aimed for those interested in mathematical theory and equivalent modeling of speakers- more for an audio graduate student.

This book (a reprint of a series of articles from ~1970) develops a general lumped element electrical-mechanical-acoustical loudspeaker enclosure model and shows how it can be used to design sealed, aperiodic, vented, and passive radiator systems. Its treatment of the math involved is much clearer and more explicit than the usual references, although treatment of the fundamentals leaves a bit to be desired. Users unfamiliar with acoustic equivalent circuits will want a reference such as Beranek's "Acoustics".

Written for engineers, this is not a hobbyist book. Despite the math, the book is very readable and probably the best single reference on what is now called Thiele/Small theory - J.E. Benson was an examiner for Small's thesis paper. The book is lush with graphs; these were colored in the original articles, but reproduced in black and white by Prompt Publications - that and the weak binding are probably the only flaws in an otherwise stellar publication. Now if someone would only print it again - a color hardbound edition would be nice!

Beware. This book, while excellent, is VERY technical. It is not for the math challenged.

This is an excellent theoretical treatment of the topic. However, any book that lacks both an index and a table of contents automatically starts out with a three star rating for me. Granted, this is a compilation of technical papers; nevertheless, an index for a text of this type is indispensible. Without it, it is very difficult to find anything. Each part has a table of contents, but there are no corresponding page numbers for the items in the table of contents.