Archive of Michael Gerzon Articles Opens

An archive of articles that the late Michael Gerzon wrote for Hi-Fi News and Studio Sound magazines has been established at the website of Hi-Fi News consultant technical editor Keith Howard.

Michael Gerzon, who died in 1996, is widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers and writers on audio of recent times. In the 1970s, for example, Gerzon established the mathematical basis for surround-sound reproduction, leading to the launch of Ambisonics as a means of re-creating a true soundfield at the listener's ear. In more recent years, he was a co-developer of the MLP lossless compression system used in multichannel DVD-A mastering and playback and he pioneered the use of DSP to correct for loudspeaker and room acoustics problems.

In addition to authoring densely technical papers for scientific publications such as the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, he also wrote a succession of more approachable pieces for a more general readership in magazines like Hi-Fi News and Studio Sound. More anecdotal than his closely focused scientific work, these pieces offer a broader view of Michael Gerzon's thoughts on and experiences of a wide panorama of audio topics. Yet they are less well known and, to date, have been more difficult to obtain.

It is to bring these readable yet erudite articles to a wider audience that the Gerzon Archive has been established, with the permission of Michael Gerzon's brother. Although the archive is small to begin with, the intention is to build it progressively into a complete collection of the articles Gerzon wrote for these magazines and perhaps others.

Both HTML and PDF versions (the latter conveniently formatted for both A4 and US Letter paper sizes) are available for viewing and/or downloading.

The Gerzon Archive can be accessed here. Keith Howard will also be contributing a series of technical articles to Stereophile, starting in the late fall of 2003.

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