[Frank Stearns]

"William Sommerwerck" writes:

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I'll repeat what I said before... Progress in sound recording and reproduction
has come about largely because of scientists and engineers who wanted that
progress -- not because the public desired it.

There's truth in that; but it's also often more complicated. Sometimes the public
(and even the "professionals") are never exposed to "something better", and exposed
in such a way that truly reveals "something better."

Take one of the Big Audio Debates of the middle 20th Century -- should radio
transmission move from a 5 Khz bandwidth to a 15 Khz bandwidth? This was a big deal,
because upgrading that crude broadcast network to 50-15K would be difficult and
expensive.

One camp said, correctly, that human hearing is much wider than 5K, and we ought to
support that for more realistic reproduction.

The other camp said, also correctly, that we've tried it and it sounds terrible so
why spend all that extra money?

It took visionaries, thinking outside the box of the day, to devise an experiment
that could show what was going on. (This might have been Avery Fisher
wanting to sell higher fidelity audio equipment who did this; don't remember.)

A live orchestra played in a setting where special baffling could be quickly dropped
in such that a narrow or wide band experience was possible. IIRC, the stage included
an acoustically transparent front scrim lit such that deployment of the HF absorbers
could not be seen and thus bias the listeners.

Of course, hands down, the wide-band presentation won over everybody, including the
nay-sayers. Then the search was on to find out why this worked, even though
wideband experiments with radio gear had yielded awful results.

Turned out that much of that primitive gear in the signal path was full of all sorts
of distortions mercifully masked by the narrow bandwidth. A wide-band system
revealed those distortions.

Once those distortions were peeled back a few orders of magnitude, indeed wider band
reproduction was a Good Thing. This all seems so obvious now.

But at that the time, there was a debate, experiments up to that point were flawed,
and the public really didn't care because they'd not been exposed to wider band
radio. (They might have even complained about the terrible sound of high-distortion
wideband. Remember, back in those days many more average folks were musicians to
some degree or were exposed to much more live, acoustic music.)

Pick your pet idea. If it really is something better, it probably needs an
experiment of some drama (such as the above) to bring it to life.

Frank
Mobile Audio

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