Audio - a very brief history of time.

I am back to Johns Hopkins teaching this semester and really enjoying it. This semester’s class is Audio Science and Technology, one of my favorites. We review core technologies in audio from acoustics to amplification to DSP. I always start the class with a history of audio starting back in the late 1800’s. It is fascinating to me that we can, with very broad strokes, roughly break the history down into four buckets.

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50 Years of Home Audio Innovations

Some would say that audio has not changed much relative to other technologies. While audio does not change at the pace of smart phones or computers, audio can trace it’s biggest innovations to the semiconductor industry and digital technology. For this list I have excluded disc based source product from the LP to the CD to the DVD to Blu Ray etc. That is another topic by itself. Until then, here are my top ten

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Digital Commodities

Welcome to the digital revolution, but perhaps it's a bit late for that salutation. The last 25 years have seen amazing changes in the audio/video business and most of the technical advances were related to digital technology. Is there a high performance side to digital or is it mass market mediocracy or bust?

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The Death of High Performance Audio

SACD battled DVD audio and iTunes won. So many of my colleagues and audiophiles talk of the death of quality audio. It this so, can it be true? Does anybody cares about audio quality any more?

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Ten Questions to Ask Before Building a Theater

Ok, so you or your customer is considering building a theater. When I am asked the best way to start planning, I have 10 questions I always ask to start the process. It may appear these questions have nothing to do with room acoustics. The truth of the matter is the space and usage planning related to a theater all have to be considered before the real engineering starts.

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