Books on Sound

If you can get your hands on it, Sound Design in the Theatre by John Bracewell is one of the best theatre sound books there is. It's officially out of print, but now that John has the rights back from the publisher, he prints copies out at Kinkos and sells them to the Ithaca College Bookstore for basically the cost of the printing. If you want to look for the published 1993 edition, it's ISBN 0-13-825167-3.

It's got everything from detailed explanations of sound system components to electrical theory to human hearing to psychoacoustics. And it even has a whole part devoted to the sound design process.
 
Get the Yammie book that audioslavematt mentioned. It's the number one go-to for sound reinforcement theory, and the current version is excellent. A very good investment.
 
What areas of sound reinforcement are you interested in; system design, system operation, production, etc.? Do you want to stay on a practical level or get deep into the science and engineering behind it?

The Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook is a great start. On pretty much the other end of the scale is Sound System Engineering, Third Edition, by Eugene Patronis and Don Davis, which is generally viewed as the detailed tech 'bible' for system design. You might want to look here (http://www.rane.com/par-book.html), here (http://www.nsca.org/Home/Store/tabid/100/List/1/Default.aspx), here (http://www.infocomm.org/cps/rde/xchg/infocomm/hs.xsl/avindustry_974.htm) and here (http://www.mcsquared.com/amazon.htm). These lists do include some books that are out of publication, but they provide a good starting point. You can also find a lot of good practical information here, http://www.prosoundweb.com/studyhall/.
 
The books are for a paper i have to write to graduate from my highschool. My topic is basically how sound is done for plays, musicals and prolly concerts. Like how the setup can be different for a musical than a play. Things like that.
 
Not to promote another web site, but if you go to www.prosoundweb.com and look at the study hall section, and the forums you will be able to get a vast amount of information
The Yamaha book is an excellent starting place, but IMO for far more indepth info check out theprosoundweb site
Sharyn
 

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