Jan 28, 2004
For various reasons, both personal and professional, I’ve been doing quite
a bit of reading for the past few weeks.
Some interesting items:
- John Atkinson’s “Measuring Loudspeakers” series (Parts
1,
2, and
3):
lots of good information about obtaining and interpreting objective loudspeaker
measurement data. The articles also touch on objective qualities that translate
into positive or negative subjective responses, as well as loudspeaker design goals.
- Dave Moulton’s AES presentation on
Acoustical Considerations for Loudspeaker Playback of Music in Small Rooms:
this presentation gives some interesting perspectives on the difficulties of obtaining
good sound in typical rooms. As a measurement guy, I particularly liked the
discussion of accuracy
(or lack thereof) in typical music recordings.
- MP3-tech.org has a great set of links to
technical papers on various aspects
to low-bit rate audio and perceptual coding. I also recommend reading the DTS
whitepaper
on their “Coherent Acoustics Coding System” used
in the professional and home implementations of the
DTS audio system. The MP3-tech.org site also has
a link to some less detailed papers on Dolby’s perceptual coding system.
There was some discussion during the December
BAS meeting about Dolby’s
perceptual coding algorithms, and the subject of forward and backward
masking came up. Some BAS’ers weren’t familiar with forward/backward masking
(as opposed to simultaneous masking which should be familiar to most audio
people).
To help people understand this type of masking, I scanned some
pages from Brian Moore’s
An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing
for that discuss forward and backward masking. Feel free to have a
look (1.2 MB PDF).
permanent link