Audio Circuit Design    

Audio Circuit Design

If you're like most manufacturers, you want electronic circuit designs with high performance and low cost. SAI's Richard Stroud has over 45 years of experience designing just these kinds of circuits.

Richard has designed small-signal processing and audio interface circuits. He has designed professional musical instrument amplifiers, audio mixers and musical instrument effects devices.

He has also designed and built high-performance vacuum tube and solid-state amplifiers.

He has three electronics patents in the fields of noise reduction and gain control. He is known for the design of "little circuits" that do big jobs for minimal costs.

Add a creative and effective audio circuit design resource to your team. Please contact us for ideas about how we can form a productive audio circuit design partnership.

Circuit Analysis

SAI can analyze your audio circuit designs and your circuit board layouts. We can recommend cost savings, noise reduction, and performance improvement opportunities for you. We can look for potential failure modes and suggest reliability improvements.

Areas of Circuit Design Expertise

SAI has expertise with the following kinds of electronic circuitry:
- Preamplifiers, gain stages, and tone circuits
- Power amplifiers: bipolar, FET or vacuum tube
- Power supplies including boost or buck circuits
- Timing and control circuits
- High-performance audio mixers
- Microphone and guitar interface circuits and
  effects pedals

SAI uses powerful circuit simulation software to build and test audio circuitry in a precise and efficient way. Even complex circuitry can be developed and tested in a relatively short period of time.

Guitar Amplifier Design

To provide an exciting performance, electric basses and guitars require a musical instrument amplifier design tailored to produce a particular sound. This sound depends on a number of factors.

These include:
- Input impedance and pre-volume gain
- Characteristics of the tone stack
- Phase splitter/interstage driver transformer
- Output tubes (or FET's) and output transformer>
- Power supply filtering and sag
- The speaker and its cabinet / box

Guitar Amplifier Design Training

Want to become a designer / builder/troubleshooter of vacuum tube guitar amps? Our Guitar Amplifier Design Course may be what you're looking for. Please see Guitar Amplifier Design for a PDF file with more information

Richard is a guitar and bass player (60's Jazzmaster, Jaquar, Jazz Bass) who has designed and built guitar amps from one with pair of 6V6's to a rock crusher with four 1625's.