Chairman at the Board is an intimate, funny, and absorbing look at the music business by an insider who has recorded a host of the greatest musical artists from the 1970s to today. Bill Schnee takes the reader inside the studio--behind the curtain--and through the decades with a cavalcade of famous artists as he helped them realize their vision. After his high school band was dropped by Decca Records, Schnee began his quest to learn everything he could about making records. Mentored by technical guru Toby Foster, mastering guru Doug Sax, and recording legend Richie Podolor at his American Recording Studio, he immediately began recording the top acts of the day as a freelance engineer/producer in Hollywood. Clive Davis soon hired him to work for CBS where he partnered with famed music producer Richard Perry. Schnee went on to record and/or mix many of Perry's biggest albums of the '70s and '80s, including those by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Art Garfunkel, and The Pointer Sisters. With his deft personal touch with musicians, he continued to engineer and/or produce the likes of Marvin Gaye, Thelma Houston (the Grammy-nominated, direct-to-disc album I've Got the Music in Me), Pablo Cruise, Neil Diamond, Boz Scaggs, the Jacksons, Huey Lewis and the News, Dire Straits, and Whitney Houston. With over 125 gold and platinum records, and two Grammys for Steely Dan's Aja and Gaucho, Schnee has been called a living legend--recognized and respected in the industry as the consummate music man with an incomparable career that he lovingly shares with his readers in humorous detail.

A beyond-cool look at the world of high-end audio design for passionate collectors, obsessive audiophiles, and design fans At a time when sales of vinyl records have hit a 25-year high, and analog technologies are providing the kind of extraordinary audio experiences that our increasingly digital world has started to remove, Hi-Fi is essential reading. This unique book explores just how, when, and why the world fell in love with the look, feel, and sound of top-of-the-line audio equipment. Hi-Fi traces this fascinating evolution from the 1950s to today (and tomorrow), taking readers right up to the current renaissance of all things analog and the emergence of cutting-edge designs for die-hard audiophiles.

Suitable for those who want to increase their mastery of digital and analog audio: musicians, producers, A&R, mastering, recording, and mixing engineers, this title offers an introduction to the procedures and technical issues involved in mastering.

Paul McGowan tells all (and then some) in this riotous tale of misbegotten success that's 99% true in all the best ways. From his not-so-innocent youth growing up in the shadow of Disneyland and summer evenings in the innocent 1950s, to his dope-smoking, snake-eating, draft-dodging, loony-bin misadventure through Europe, to his struggles to build a thriving enterprise from a stack of dusty albums-see how the CEO of a worldwide company took fifty years to become an overnight success.Unlike Paul, you may never get picked up by the Secret Service or carry the shame of bankruptcy, but you just might see yourself in his repeated failures or in his refusal to let life keep him down. You'll laugh and you'll cry as Paul describes the struggle of finding his place in a community you never knew existed. Through it all, you'll discover what Paul did: life's detours offer the best opportunities to find your way.

Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms, Third Edition explains the physical and perceptual processes that are involved in sound reproduction and demonstrates how to use the processes to create high-quality listening experiences in stereo and multichannel formats. Understanding the principles of sound production is necessary to achieve the goals of sound reproduction in spaces ranging from recording control rooms and home listening rooms to large cinemas. This revision brings new science-based perspectives on the performance of loudspeakers, room acoustics, measurements and equalization, all of which need to be appropriately used to ensure the accurate delivery of music and movie sound tracks from creators to listeners. The robust website (www.routledge.com/cw/toole) is the perfect companion to this necessary resource.

This comprehensive book on audio power amplifier design will appeal to members of the professional audio engineering community as well as the student and enthusiast. Designing Audio Power Amplifiersbegins with power amplifier design basics that a novice can understand and moves all the way through to in-depth design techniques for very sophisticated audiophiles and professional audio power amplifiers. This book is the single best source of knowledge for anyone who wishes to design audio power amplifiers. It also provides a detailed introduction to nearly all aspects of analog circuit design, making it an effective educational text. Develop and hone your audio amplifier design skills with in-depth coverage of these and other topics: Basic and advanced audio power amplifier design Low-noise amplifier design Static and dynamic crossover distortion demystified Understanding negative feedback and the controversy surrounding it Advanced NFB compensation techniques, including TPC and TMC Sophisticated DC servo design MOSFET power amplifiers and error correction Audio measurements and instrumentation Overlooked sources of distortion SPICE simulation for audio amplifiers, including a tutorial on LTspice SPICE transistor modeling, including the VDMOS model for power MOSFETs Thermal design and the use of ThermalTrak(tm) transistors Four chapters on class D amplifiers, including measurement techniques Professional power amplifiers Switch-mode power supplies (SMPS). design Static and dynamic crossover distortion demystified Understanding negative feedback and the controversy surrounding it Advanced NFB compensation techniques, including TPC and TMC Sophisticated DC servo design MOSFET power amplifiers and error correction Audio measurements and instrumentation Overlooked sources of distortion SPICE simulation for audio amplifiers, including a tutorial on LTspice SPICE transistor modeling, including the VDMOS model for power MOSFETs Thermal design and the use of ThermalTrak(tm) transistors Four chapters on class D amplifiers, including measurement techniques Professional power amplifiers Switch-mode power supplies (SMPS). the use of ThermalTrak(tm) transistors Four chapters on class D amplifiers, including measurement techniques Professional power amplifiers Switch-mode power supplies (SMPS).

An NPR Best Book of 2017 "This is not a book about why vinyl sounds better; it's way more interesting than that . . . it] is full of things I didn't know, like why people yell into cellphones . . . Ultimately, it's about how we consume sound as a society - which is, increasingly, on an individual basis." --NPR "If you're a devoted music fan who's dubious about both rosy nostalgia and futuristic utopianism, Damon Krukowski's The New Analog is for you." --The New York Times Book Review "A pointedly passionate look at what's been lost in the digital era." --Los Angeles Times What John Berger did to ways of seeing, well-known indie musician Damon Krukowski does to ways of listening in this lively guide to the transition from analog to digital culture Having made his name in the late 1980s as a member of the indie band Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowski has watched cultural life lurch from analog to digital. And as an artist who has weathered the transition, he has challenging, urgent questions for both creators and consumers about what we have thrown away in the process: Are our devices leaving us lost in our own headspace even as they pinpoint our location? Does the long reach of digital communication come at the sacrifice of our ability to gauge social distance? Do streaming media discourage us from listening closely? Are we hearing each other fully in this new environment? Rather than simply rejecting the digital disruption of cultural life, Krukowski uses the sound engineer's distinction of signal and noise to reexamine what we have lost as a technological culture, looking carefully at what was valuable in the analog realm so we can hold on to it. Taking a set of experiences from the production and consumption of music that have changed since the analog era--the disorientation of headphones, flattening of the voice, silence of media, loudness of mastering, and manipulation of time--as a basis for a broader exploration of contemporary culture, Krukowski gives us a brilliant meditation and guide to keeping our heads amid the digital flux. Think of it as plugging in without tuning out.

In 12 fact-filled chapters--covering everything from stereo to multichannel music to home theater--discover how to choose the best components for the money, how to match components fore the best sound, and how to set up and fine-tune a system for maximum performance.