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Author Topic: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"  (Read 6388 times)

Jonathan Johnson

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PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« on: October 14, 2011, 01:41:02 AM »

There was an article by Bobby Owsinski posted yesterday on PSW entitled "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented." I'll let you read it for yourself, but I figured I'd share my thoughts here.

1. A new loudspeaker technology. The basic function of any current loudspeaker is to take an electrical representation of an acoustic waveform and return it to an acoustic waveform: moving large amounts of air back and forth to subsequently vibrate my eardrums. Mr. Owsinski states, "We’ve been listening to recorded and reinforced sound with the same technology for about 100 years now... What we need is a new loudspeaker technology that improves the listening experience and takes sonic realism to the next level." The current crop of loudspeakers actually does a mighty fine job of accurately reproducing the signal they are fed. Where they fail is in defining the sound stage: in live sound reinforcement (and in most recorded sound reproduction) the speaker is NEVER in the same location as the performer. Therefore, you will never gain absolute realism... but I think that maybe someday, someone will figure out a way to fool the listener into believing the amplified sound is coming from the performer rather than the box in the ceiling. (But what if you WANT the peculiar coloration your loudspeaker provides?) Or the performer could just be louder.

2. A new microphone technology. If we like how it sounds, why do we need something new? Or is Mr. Owsinski just itching for something new for the sake of having something new? Oh, I think that something new might come along. Just don't expect it to be better for all applications. Perhaps some optical system that bounces light off a diaphragm -- like in spy novels where they bounce a laser off of a window. (Oh yeah, Mr. Owsinski derided the diaphragm.) Or maybe something that optically detects changes in the index of refraction of air due to sound pressure waves. (Kind of an optical version of the condenser mic.)

3. Get rid of the wires. I would love this more than any other new technology. It's even technically possible (although getting rid of power wires is infeasible). The problem we are currently facing is bandwidth saturation: getting a solid signal among all the other coherent interference is becomes increasingly difficult as more devices are added to the radio frequency spectrum. Time to go optical? That means ensuring sight lines never get blocked.

4. The ultimate work surface. Physical knobs and faders are nice, but the options for scalability and flexibility are limited. I think that the future will be multiple multitouch screens: you will be able to quickly remodel your work surface with the click of a mouse flick of a finger. (The mouse needs to GO AWAY.) Custom mounts for the screens to lay them out any way you want. What it lacks? Tactile feedback. You have to LOOK at the screen to know where your knobs are. Maybe virtual reality gloves combined with screens.

5. The ultimate audio file format. It's analog, pure and simple. Any digital sample-based format is, ultimately, lossy. Even "lossless" algorithms are lossy. Until you figure out how to decode an acoustic signal into its component mathematical formulae, you will never achieve a perfect representation outside of analog. Even Mr. Owsinski admits, "the ultimate in digital is analog! In other words, the higher the sample rate, the closer to analog it sounds."

6. The ultimate storage device. This goes back to #5. The ultimate storage device will provide an accurate ANALOG representation of the signal and be technologically, chemically, thermally, dimensionally, organically, and possibly, optically stable. Like an etching on a disc. (OK, so that place stores digital data. But the same concept *could* be used for analog data.)

A thousand years from now when a future civilization discovers an analog vinyl recording in one of our landfills, they will probably quickly recognize that the pattern in the groove represents an audio waveform (assuming it is physically stable). The effort required to reverse engineer any digital format will be much higher.

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Jonathan Johnson

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #1 on: October 14, 2011, 01:47:30 AM »

While digital technology certainly introduces features that aren't possible (or are extremely difficult and expensive) in the analog world, I don't think it is the solution to all of our problems. We need to look at new technologies for transmitting and recording sound within the analog realm, and I think that optical is certainly one way of doing that. In the audio world, optical technology seems to be limited to CD recording and assistive listening systems and some audio transmission. I think it's time to consider how optical technology can be implemented in other facets of audio production.
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John Roberts {JR}

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #2 on: October 14, 2011, 10:43:03 AM »

Yawn...
If he thinks loudspeakers haven't changed in 100 years he isn't paying much attention. While I challenge the paradigm of trying to recreate 3 dimensional sound fields with a few point sources, other more complex approaches have been tried and failed.

On trend in big dog PA that I expect to continue (I think DR pioneered it), is separate PA for different sound sources (drum bass PA, vocalist PA, etc). This resembles the band performing on individual instruments, only BIGGER.
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Complaining about mic technology because it is mature, may be fodder to get an article published but not justification for fixing something that isn't broken. I expect mic technology development to focus on the back end, with mics that talk directly to a wireless digital network.
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Wires- I looked into this decades ago, and the technology wasn't ready, it will happen eventually, when consumer computer applications drive the technology to where it makes sense on a cost effective basis.  Tear down a bar band after closing time, that is time we would all like to get back, and wires are even more of a PIA at set up. It comes down to what will people pay to get that time back. At some point it will pay for itself.
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I have already proposed how to deal with work surface interfaces.. VR glasses and gameboy glove so you can have infinite knobs and controls with real time WYSIWYG. The technology is almost here but market probably isn't ready for this yet.  SR is not large enough market to support much development of game like hybrid VR systems.  Think heads-up display for jet fighter cockpits. Such a soft interface could support novel control paradigms, like pointing to an artist on stage to access that input channel.
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Ultimate file format- I think I mused about this in print back in the '80s. At the time i thought some uber-dense bit rate, that could be parsed down to support lower data rates as a simple subset. With a couple decades of hindsight, the answer is, whatever the consumer technology gives us.
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For ultimate storage- see above, or old star trek episodes, or the cloud.

JR
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Steve Kennedy-Williams

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #3 on: October 14, 2011, 01:27:31 PM »

Yawn...
If he thinks loudspeakers haven't changed in 100 years he isn't paying much attention. While I challenge the paradigm of trying to recreate 3 dimensional sound fields with a few point sources, other more complex approaches have been tried and failed.

On trend in big dog PA that I expect to continue (I think DR pioneered it), is separate PA for different sound sources (drum bass PA, vocalist PA, etc). This resembles the band performing on individual instruments, only BIGGER.

JR


While Dave Rat is a big proponent of Dual PA/ or more, I'd have to give the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound as credit as the first big dog PA with seperate systems for each instrument. Wish I'd been over the age of 5 when it was deployed.

http://www.dozin.com/wallofsound/index.html# for their 1974 configuration. ;D
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John Roberts {JR}

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #4 on: October 14, 2011, 02:14:41 PM »

Not to take any credit away from the technological achievements associated with the wall of sound (like noise canceling mics), I recall doing a patent search back in the '70s when to do a search literally involved going to Arlington, Va and searching through drawers (called shoes) full of paper patent files. I recall seeing a very old patent for a glorified Hifi system that was something like that with different speakers for the different instruments. Of course my recollection is a little vague, as I only came across it in passing a few decades ago. 

DR pioneered it (again) recently, but the ancients are always stealing our good ideas.

JR
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Ivan Beaver

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #5 on: October 14, 2011, 09:29:21 PM »

Not to take any credit away from the technological achievements associated with the wall of sound (like noise canceling mics), I recall doing a patent search back in the '70s when to do a search literally involved going to Arlington, Va and searching through drawers (called shoes) full of paper patent files. I recall seeing a very old patent for a glorified Hifi system that was something like that with different speakers for the different instruments. Of course my recollection is a little vague, as I only came across it in passing a few decades ago. 

DR pioneered it (again) recently, but the ancients are always stealing our good ideas.

JR
The seperate loudsepeakers would only work if the recorded music was in a multitrack format.  Not to many of those has been released to the public.  And if they were, then all sorts of people would be remixing them.

OH they do that anyway. :'(
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John Roberts {JR}

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #6 on: October 15, 2011, 10:20:44 AM »

The seperate loudsepeakers would only work if the recorded music was in a multitrack format.  Not to many of those has been released to the public.  And if they were, then all sorts of people would be remixing them.

OH they do that anyway. :'(

Well that response wins some kind of an obviousness (if that's a word) award. This very old idea (like the electric car) didn't rise to commercial success when first invented so clearly had limitations preventing mass market merchantability. Disney animatronics may be a small scale example.

Another obvious flaw is that the system would need a lot more channels and bigger room to effectively recreate a symphonic orchestra, but at least the inventor identified the crucial flaw in trying to make 3d (4d- and time?) sound fields with 2D (3D?) tools.

The DR trick has merit for probably a different reason, like cleaning up the individual PAs with simpler signals.

JR

PS: Back on topic I still wonder about large scale electrostatic loudspeakers, driven by class D amplifiers to perhaps match the reactive load to that compatible output stage. Of course there is the little detail of a bipolar sound source to deal with, but perhaps some clever horn guy can figure that out.  8)
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Cameron Stuckey

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #7 on: October 15, 2011, 01:14:17 PM »

This article made me more frustrated than I thought it would have.

1. He clearly hasn't seen much top tier theater. Many shows use location transponders to recalculate delay times for each actor depending on their position on stage. And, it's been used for a few years. There are times when I'm watching a number in tech rehearsal sitting far house left and the only source of the actor is coming from their mouth dead center stage, yet I know the speakers are hitting me; it's breath taking.

3. No. Turning everything into wireless communications is a mistake, let alone in a studio. If it is sitting there, then the is no need for wireless connectivity. Packet loss on a hardwired isolated network is 1.5% at worst and on a wireless network can climb to as high as 30%. If we want to be transmitting lossless audio, packet loss is unacceptable. I do agree that all the wires should be condensed to one network wire. Just connect everything you have together with a CAT5 and the network will figure out the routing and architecture.
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John Roberts {JR}

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #8 on: October 15, 2011, 02:13:06 PM »

Agreed,,, the wireless is probably attractive to people uncomfortable with configuring complex interfaces. it seems attractive to me for bar band gigs where the equipment is set up and struck for every show.  Install and quasi-permanent set ups can easily tolerate wire/fiber.

FWIW there is s huge cost element (savings) in substituting DSP processing and digital networking for the classic stacks of rack gear and miles of wire in old school big dog installs. 

JR
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eric wong

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #9 on: October 20, 2011, 09:42:18 PM »



1. A new loudspeaker technology. The basic function of any current loudspeaker is to take an electrical representation of an acoustic waveform and return it to an acoustic waveform: moving large amounts of air back and forth to subsequently vibrate my eardrums. Mr. Owsinski states, "We’ve been listening to recorded and reinforced sound with the same technology for about 100 years now... What we need is a new loudspeaker technology that improves the listening experience and takes sonic realism to the next level." The current crop of loudspeakers actually does a mighty fine job of accurately reproducing the signal they are fed. Where they fail is in defining the sound stage: in live sound reinforcement (and in most recorded sound reproduction) the speaker is NEVER in the same location as the performer. Therefore, you will never gain absolute realism... but I think that maybe someday, someone will figure out a way to fool the listener into believing the amplified sound is coming from the performer rather than the box in the ceiling. (But what if you WANT the peculiar coloration your loudspeaker provides?) Or the performer could just be louder.



Isn't that what the Bose L1 does?  ;D
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Dave Dermont

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #10 on: October 22, 2011, 02:09:34 PM »


Isn't that what the Bose L1 does?  ;D

Always remember:

Recorded music is supposed to sound live.

Live music is supposed to sound just like the recording.



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Chris Davis

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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #11 on: October 22, 2011, 02:25:20 PM »

Always remember:

Recorded music is supposed to sound live.


But has anyone thought about that other than Roger Nichols?
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Re: PSW article: "Six Audio Products That Need To Be Invented"
« Reply #11 on: October 22, 2011, 02:25:20 PM »


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