The screen door slams
Mary's dress waves—Bruce Springsteen, "Thunder Road" (footnote 1)
Novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990) was an unusually acute observer of the effects—for good and ill—of modernity on traditional societies and the people who live in them. A Southerner and an adult convert to Catholicism, Percy was indeed a "Southern writer." But he was a Southern writer who owed more to Camus, Sartre, and Pascal than to Faulkner. Although he studied philosophy, Percy's undergraduate degree was in chemistry. He went on to become a doctor, but his medical career in New York was cut…
The other exception is a concert video of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band playing "Rosalita." I gather what happened is that The Old Grey Whistle Test was going to broadcast an interview with Springsteen (which is included among the DVD's bonus features), and, for whatever reason, he could not or would not perform in their studio. So they broadcast (and then archived) concert footage, which I believe had been shot in Phoenix, Arizona. Interestingly enough, while the same basic "Rosalita" footage did appear on the older videocassette compilation of Springsteen's music videos, the OGWT…
Letters in response appeared in July 2004 (Vol.27 No.7):
A class act
Editor: I have just finished reading John Marks' "The Fifth Element" column in the May Stereophile. I am literally floored by his homage to Bruce Springsteen. What an incredible piece of writing. This is a classic piece and John is a class act. Thank you.—Joel Waterman, San Jose, CA
Heartfelt thanks for your kind words, Joel. When I wrote that column, I was apprehensive whether anyone, with the possible exception of John Atkinson (I think he is very much on my "wavelength;';'), would "get it." Letters…
Siegfried Linkwitz was born in Germany in 1935. He received his electrical engineering degree from Darmstadt Technical University prior to moving to California in 1961 to work for Hewlett-Packard. During his early years in the USA, he did postgraduate work at Stanford University. For over 30 years Mr. Linkwitz has developed electronic test equipment ranging from signal generators, to network and spectrum analyzers, to microwave sweepers and instrumentation for evaluating electromagnetic compatibility. He has also had a long and distinguished second career as an audio engineering…
Russ Riley is a very ingenious design engineer and, on top of it, a superb listener. I was always impressed by how easily he could identify just what the problems were in a speaker and in what frequency range and what one needed to do about them. He had absolutely superb hearing. While not as well-known as some of the other engineers, both Lyman and Russ had a big impact on my early audio career. Through my work in developing test equipment for Hewlett-Packard, I met Laurie Fincham [then with KEF, now with Lucasfilm THX after a stint at Infinity] and we became good friends. We've shared…
Another test I perform looks for resonances and stored energy in various locations—using a Shaped Tone Burst stimulus which is particularly well-suited for this. This is a tremendous test signal. I measure the impedance curve of the drivers themselves to reveal driver anomalies, and I also use complex multi-tone signals to test for nonlinear intermodulation distortion artifacts. Dickson: This is essentially the spectral contamination distortion measurement you are speaking of?
Linkwitz: Yes exactly, the same concept, in order to find nonlinear problems. Interestingly, in the old…
As I looked further into this issue, I realized that two principal things were not well-understood. First, very little was known at that time about the effects of diffraction from the cabinet edges. Second, and more importantly, very little was understood about how phase-shift with respect to the current passing through the voice-coils of different drivers affected the polar radiation pattern of a speaker. In other words, the interaction between the electrical side of a driver and the acoustical response was not clear at the time. For example, the phase-shift between the current in the…
Linkwitz: I would have to say the departure in my thinking happened by coincidence. At the time, I had volunteered to build a public address system to improve speech and sound intelligibility for a video production in a large, highly reverberant gymnasium. I designed a long directional column speaker with multiple 6" dynamic drivers firing as dipoles. In other words, the back of the column's baffle was open so the sound radiated to the front and rear with each direction out of phase with the other. The directivity of the radiation pattern of this design worked really well in this very…
Dickson: Yes, I've noticed I can hear increased focus in the low bass when I toe-in the woofers. This is one speaker where "stereo" bass may have some real meaning. Two of the Dvorak's sonic characteristics I find most striking are its dramatic reduction of room-induced colorations from the low bass through the midrange, and its ability to convey image height in correct proportion to the width and depth dimension of the soundfield. What factors do you think contribute most to these effects? Linkwitz: These are primarily due to the dipole characteristics and the even room response. Since…
Larry Archibald on CD:
This article on Compact Discs and CD players is by Doug Sax, president of Sheffield Records and a longtime opponent of digital recording. J. Gordon Holt offers a response elsewhere in this issue, in which he advises readers to buy a Compact Disc player as soon as they can afford it. Gordon in general hails the Compact Disc as the greatest thing to hit audio since the stereophonic LP. Sax's article was initially written for Billboard magazine. Billboard also ran a response from Peter Burkowitz of Polygram entitled "Sax on CD: A Bigoted Attack." We don't have…
