Basic Electronics for Recording Engineers - Part 5 - Schematic Diagrams

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In electronic equipment, a schematic diagram is used as a map to show how all the various components are interconnected. This is useful for troubleshooting and repair. And following the signal path through a circuit gives us a deeper understanding of how the equipment does its job.

Schematics in the past were beautifully drawn and easy to interpret. But today, most electronic equipment is not repairable at the component level, so manufacturers have mostly stop including schematic diagrams. And those that do usually describe circuitry built on printed circuit boards. The software used to design those boards do not care about the readability of the schematics, so the diagrams are difficult to interpret.

In this episode, I describe the various symbols used to represent the most common parts found in audio equipment. I hope it will be helpful should you ever need to see how a circuit works, for repair or just education. And you can learn to draw your own schematics, even if only to show how your studio is wired.

Since this an audio podcast, I cannot show how the symbols actually look. This link leads to a good reference of schematic symbols, including many variations you might encounter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_symbol

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