Chapter Excerpts

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Chapter 3: Interfacing Electrical and Acoustic Systems
3.1 Alternating Current Circuits

If it were not for fear of being plagiaristic, this chapter might well be entitled Alice in Wonderland,with sincere apologies to Lewis Carroll. This thought stems from the puzzled expressions observed appearing on the faces of countless students when they first encounter this subject matter. This puzzlement follows from the fact that most students know quite a bit about steady state dc circuits and their mindset is to try to push the hearsay knowledge they have of ac circuits into this same framework. This does not work well at all and is similar to working on an automobile with a set of English wrenches when all of the nuts and bolts are metric. A few wrenches will fit and then only approximately. Any real craftsman knows that in order to do jobs properly, one must have the appropriate tools. If your knowledge of this subject matter is only cursory, it might be well to put aside what you may already know and begin acquiring a new set of tools or concepts as they are introduced in the following. The goal is to arrive at a thorough basic understanding rather than try to memorize a set of mysterious rules. When you thoroughly understand something, you are able to write the rulebook yourself.