Audio and Acoustic DNA—Do You Know Your Audio and Acoustic Ancestors? 19In my mind, these calculators revolutionized audio
education, especially for those without advanced uni-
versity educations. The ability to quickly and accurately
work with logarithm, trigonometric functions, complex
numbers, etc., freed us from the tyranny of books of
tables, slide rules, and carefully hoarded volumes such
as Massa’s acoustic design charts and Vegas’s ten place
log tables.
For the multitude of us who had experienced diffi-
culty in engineering courses with misplaced decimal
points and slide rule manipulation and extrapolation, the
HP 35 released inherent talents we didn’t realize we
possessed. The x^y key allowed instant K numbers. The
ten-place log tables became historical artifacts.
When I suggested to the then president of Altec that
we should negotiate being the one to sell the HP 35s to
the electronics industry (Altec then owned Allied
Radio,) his reply stunned me, “We are not in the calcu-
lator business.” I thought as he said it, “Neither is Hewl-
ett Packard.” His decision made it easy for me to
consider leaving Altec.
I soon left Altec and started Synergetic Audio Con-
cepts, teaching seminars in audio education. I gave each
person attending a seminar an HP 35 to use during the
3-day seminar. I know that many of those attending
immediately purchased an HP calculator, which
changed their whole approach to audio system design.
As Tom Osborne wrote, “The HP 35 and HP 65
changed the world we live in.”
Since the political demise of the Soviet Union,
“Mozarts-without-a-piano” have been freed to express
their brilliance. Dr. Wolfgang Ahnert, from former East
Germany, was enabled to use his mathematical skills
with matching computer tools to dominate the
audio-acoustic design market place.
The Meaning of CommunicationThe future of audio and acoustics stands on the shoul-
ders of the giants we have discussed, and numerous
ones that we have inadvertently overlooked. The dis-
coverers of new and better ways to generate, distribute,
and control sound will be measured consciously or
unconsciously by their predecessor’s standards. Fad and
fundamentals will be judged eventually. Age councils
that “the ancients are stealing our inventions.” The
uncovering of an idea new to you is as thrilling as it was
to the first person to do so.The history of audio and acoustics is the saga of the
mathematical understanding of fundamental physical
laws. Hearing and seeing are illusionary, restricted by
the inadequacy of our physical senses. The science and
art of audio and acoustics are essential to our under-
standing of history inasmuch as art is metaphysical
(above the physical). Also art precedes science.
That the human brain processes music and art in a
different hemisphere from speech and mathematics sug-
gests the difference between information, that can be
mathematically defined and communication that cannot.
A message is the flawless transmission of a text. Drama,
music, and great oratory cannot be flawlessly transmitted
by known physical systems. For example, the spatial
integrity of a great orchestra in a remarkable acoustic
space is today even with our astounding technological
strides only realizable by attending the live performance.
The complexity of the auditory senses defies efforts
to record or transmit it faithfully.
The perception of good audio will often flow from
the listener’s past experience, i.e., wow and flutter
really annoys musicians whereas harmonic distortion,
clipping, etc., grate on an engineer’s ear–mind system.
I have not written about today’s highly hyped prod-
ucts as their history belongs to the survivors of the early
21st century. It can be hoped that someday physicists
and top engineers will for some magic reason return to
the development of holographic audio systems that
approach fidelity.
Telecommunication technology, fiber optics, lasers,
satellites, etc. have obtained worldwide audiences for
both trash and treasure.
The devilish power that telecommunications has pro-
vided demagogues is frightening, but shared communi-
cation has revealed to a much larger audience the
prosperity of certain ideas over others, and one can hope
that the metaphysics behind progress will penetrate a
majority of the minds out there.
That the audio industry’s history has barely begun is
evidenced every time one attends a live performance.
We will, one day, look back on the neglect of the meta-
physical element, perhaps after we have uncovered the
parameters at present easily heard but unmeasurable by
our present sciences. History awaits the ability to gener-
ate the sound field rather than a sound field. When a
computer is finally offered to us that is capable of such
generation, the question it must answer is,“How does it feel?”