"Dick Pierce" wrote in message
...
Audio Empire wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:59:11 -0700, Dick Pierce wrote
(in article ):
Gary Eickmeier wrote:
I sat right behind Gordon Holt at a demo
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But afterward Gordon and I were agreed ...
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I had a relatively famous British writer and acoustician, Peter Mapp,
over for a listen ...
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I studied Industrial Design in college ...
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a letter to Bose and a call from him and subsequent visit to the
factory to talk with his chief engineer
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Dr. Bose once told me ...
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Dr. Mark Davis, another of my heroes, was one of his students
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And my grandfather kissed Jane Withers: so what?
Really? And that didn't turn him off of women for life?
No, but he did subsequently die.
What are you expecting people to do with the above? It's pure hearsay,
and until these people step forward and corroborate your story, there's
no way for us to tell whether it's true or you just made it up.
It would be hard for Gordon to "step forward" as he's no longer with us.
Yup. I knew that, and did he leave behind any corroboration
of this encounter?
But I can corroborate that he didn't think much of the Wilson WAMMs,
and he was one of my closest friends.
Fine, so we have some indirect corroboration of his viewpoint
on the topic.
But that's not the entirety of his claim: he seems to want us to
give credence to his claim becuse of the nature of the claimed
encounter. Now, if in fact you read his claim carefully, it's
an interesting construct: He claims to have sat behind Gordon Holt,
which could mean that Gordon Holt, without turing around, could
have been utterly unaware of his presence. And, he later states
that he and Mr. Holt "were agreed."
So what?
This is like what my same grandfather used to tell the wholesalers
in New York when they'd ask him how was business, "Great, last month
alone, Marshall Fields and I did over $100,000,000!" The fact that he
and Mr. Holt "were agreed" lends no credence to his claim any more
than my grandfathers lumping his and Marshall Fields business in the
same answer (the only difference was my grandfather was joking,
though not all his audience saw the joke).
And let's go one step further in his claim, "The dealer, of course,
thought they were the end of the trail." Who gives a flying dingleberry
what a dealer thinks? Why is this considered relevant
name dropping doesn't cut much ice.
And this is precisely my point: all of these claims are hearsay,
and without the corroborative backup, they are no more valuable
to supporting data than pure fabrication.
RAHE members, moderators, interested parties -
This is one of the silliest conversations I have yet encountered about my
Image Model Theory. Well, actually, it isn't even about that, because it
says nothing about it as usual.
I have had lunch with Mark Davis, Amar Bose, Jeffrey Borish, I consider
Floyd Toole a friend, as well as John Atkinson, Tom Nousaine, and Arny
Krueger. I am a member of the AES and the BAS. And so on.
But none of that has anything to do with IMT, nor have I said it did. Most
of those friends and acquaintances don't even agree with my theory, or won't
talk about it much, even though, for example, Borish has an image model
theory of his own!
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=4447
I had a long conversation with Siegfried Linkwitz on the phone about The
Challenge, and we are basically in agreement on our observations about
speaker placement and room reflectivity. I hesitate to quote him because I
don't want to mis-speak, but he indicated that in one listening session he
had a salesman from a sound absorber company come in and place some of his
absorbers behind and beside his speakers to demonstrate how much they cold
help. With every step the Auditory Scene that he has been studying and
trying to explain collapsed more toward the speakers and lost depth and
spaciousness.
These sort of findings and especially my IMT are so surprising and contrary
to what most engineers believe that they are afraid to say it out loud or in
print for fear of the sort of criticism that is always leveled at me. All of
the parts of IMT are well-known and have long been studied and supported by
acousticians and designers throughout audio history, but have never been
synthesized into a stereo theory that puts it all together and states it
right out in the open, because it is so surprising.
Existing stereo theory seems to be that the entire burden of imaging is
carried by the direct sound from a pair or a line of speakers, that the
process is one of relaying the sound that the microphones "heard" straight
to your ears without interference from too many reflections from the room
nearby. They can't deny the need for some room reflections because they have
tried stereo in an anechoic chamber, but it goes not much farther than LEDE
or similar, still trying to keep the reflections away from the front of the
room.
The components of IMT are the well-known need for the lateral reflections
for spaciousness and good sound in general, image shift, and speaker
positioning and the audible effects related to their first reflections in
the surfaces near them. IMT states that if done properly these reflections
are the cause of the kind of imaging that audiophiles prize but don't know
what causes them - namely, depth, spaciousness, and the soundstage seeming
to "float" in a region outside of the speaker boxes themselves due to a
controlled image shift toward the reflective surfaces. This becomes even
more important to understand when you are using omnis and dipoles, and of
course the Direct/Reflecting designs of Bose.
Going further into this, I saw that this principle is so important that it
calls for a whole new theory for stereo, one which sees the stereo image as
a model of the live sound rather than this erroneous paradigm of a "picture"
of another acoustic space being relayed to your ears by the speakers. It
calls for a whole new way of looking at the process, which in turn calls for
a new look at loudspeaker design for this modeling effect rather than the
previously thought paradigm of "accuracy" of the direct field.
Relating all this to you has been my passion and mission for over 30 years.
It is usually rejected because it calls for waves of change in understanding
of the difference between head-related and field-type systems, stereo as a
model of live sound rather than a portal or window, loudspeaker design for
radiation pattern, room acoustics and design, speaker positioning, and
surround sound to support the full reverberant field.
None of all that has anything to do with who I had lunch with, what anyone
in particular thinks about it, my CV, or the price of tea in China. It is
what it is, it is what I have described in my IDEAS contained in my papers
and writings, not my name dropping. If Mr. Pierce is unable to address those
IDEAS themselves, then I would ask him to state what his design parameters
for speakers are, how he thinks stereo "really" works, come up with
something factual that refutes my statements about acoustics, speaker
positioning, image clustering, the need for lateral reflections, anything
that we can sink our teeth into besides all the personal attacks. You are
not impressed by my list of friends, I am not impressed by your CV. I would
be impressed by your IDEAS on the subject if you have any.
Gary Eickmeier