On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:08:40 -0400, Andy wrote:
>(Though I do personally wonder why there are still so many references to the
>"pin 1" problem ... since I thought it got its name from the pin 1 on XLR
>connectors, and I doubt many people outside the pro audio field use those.
>:-) It seems like it ought to be given a better name.)
One of the working principles of scientific discovery is that those who
discover a scientific principle get to name it, and it was Neil Muncy, an ex-
ham who works in pro audio who figured it out, it has been those of us
working in pro audio who wrote an international Standard to define the right
way to do it (AES48), and it has been those of us working on the EMC side of
pro audio who have carried that message to the rest of the world. I presented
this work to the IEEE EMC Working Group in 2005 in the form of a technical
paper and 4 hour tutorial on EMC as it relates to audio.
One of the major problems in our modern world is that things are so complex
that very narrow disciplines have emerged around every specialty, and few
engineers have time to learn anything outside their own specialty (and
perhaps a few specialties that overlap theirs). Many of us working in pro
audio need to be conversant in RF, digital audio, DSP, analog circuitry,
transmission lines, acoustics, psychoacoustics (human perception of sound),
and both the technical and artistic sides of music. Luckily, the Standards
Committee of the AES (Audio Engineering Society) includes engineers with that
much breadth.
A related problem is that many engineers working in a discipline fail to
realize that some other disciplines are far more complex than their own. RF
guys, for example, tend to look down on audio because it's those low
frequencies below RF, and low implies simple to them. Nothing could be
further from the truth -- few RF systems cover more than about 10% bandwdith
(that is, wavelengths that very by 1 to 1.1), but a high fidelity audio
system must deal with wavelengths that vary by a factor of 1,000:1. A
loudspeaker and a microphone is the equivalent of an antenna that work from
300 kHz to 300 MHz! And making sound work in a performance space is the
equivalent of controlling the propagation over that same range of
frequencies. VERY complex.
73,
Jim Brown K9YC
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