[Benj]

On Apr 21, 9:26*pm, "hanson" wrote:

A telescope makes things look closer.
A directional microphone makes things sound closer.

This is pretty much wrong. A telescope is an imaging device that
magnifies the image of distant objects. A directional microphone, on
the other hand, is a directional audio antenna. It is analogous to a
directional radio or other electromagnetic antenna, not a telescope.
One CAN however produce a map of some sonic source with one by
scanning it over the source and recording intensities.

Bull horns and loudspeakers are certainly NOT
audio telescopes as inferred by other posters.

True.

A telescope, audio or video, is a passive instrument
that absorbs incoming info/energy, like these audio
gismos he *
http://www.lilesnet.com/didjaknow/eardar/

I positively LOVE the old gadgets at this site! My all-time favorite
is the Dr. Seuss machine (the last one in the series of photos).
Thanks for the laughs, ha ha ha Hanson.

Note that these gadgets are directional microphones, NOT "audio
telescopes" even though they do map intensities of sources. Oh wait.
The exception would be the huge curved "mirrors" built on the coast.
These doubtless DO form sonic images of the source which can be
scanned by movable microphones or a huge array of them totally
analogous to a telescope where the image plane can be scanned with a
single photocell. The horn units do NOT form images.