Audio-modulated solid-state tesla coils

• Notable people/organizations:
  • Bill Slade's setup sounds really good. video, pdf, website
  • Steve Ward made the world's largest DRSSTC. website, videos: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], amazing images (near the bottom)
  • EasternVoltResearch, oriented more towards commercial profit, but they have some free info available, and participate in the community. circuits, videos
  
  
• 4hv.org forums, THE forum where all of the above hang out. They also have a wiki set up to document high voltage electronics.
  
  
• Terms/technologies involved:
  • Class E refers to a specific type of power amplifier
  • SSTC = Solid State Tesla Coil, a tesla driver that has no spark gap, but instead uses semiconductors to control the rapid (5–100MHz) switching on and off of the power through the primary coil, giving a lot more control (allows it to be self-tuning, allows the tuning to vary in real-time as primary loading changes due to temperature/proximity, allows modulation, etc)
  • DRSSTC = Dual Resonant SSTC
  • DWSSTC = Dirty Weekend SSTC, any design that's particularly intended to be built quickly by hobbyists
  • IGBT = a relatively new type of transistor that can switch a very large amount of power, very quickly. Previously, the only option available in solid-state teslas was the MOSFET, which tend to burn out frequently, and can be a major ongoing expense.