This past week, I had the privilege of attending the launch of an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral. One of my friends brought up the phenomenon of the distorted sound we hear from rocket engines... At SPLs of well over 150db, the air surrounding the rocket is incapable of transmitting distortion-free sound to our ears, hence the crackling sound we hear during shuttle launches. vibrationdata/tutorials/nongaussian_acoustics.pdf And that got me thinking about the air in our listening rooms. We spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on the very finest turntables, cartridges, amplifiers, cables and speakers, seeking the nth degree of reproduction accuracy... a theoretical perfection. The final component in our audio systems is the very air moved by our speakers which subsequently move our eardrums to pick up the sound generated by our expensive audio equipment. And while we obsess over little bridges to keep our speaker cables off the floor, we give no consideration to this final, and arguably very important component of our listening chain. Does the air in our listening rooms transmit the sound from our speakers to our ears with absolute accuracy? Or even accuracy commensurate with the quality of the rest of our systems? Is air the best medium for transmitting sound to our ears, or would some other gas do a better job? Does barometric pressure and humidity affect the accuracy of our atmospheres sound transmission? Do furniture, doorways or other objects create aerodynamic artifacts in the sound we hear? Why do this all-important component of our listening system go ignored? Is atmosphere manipulation the next frontier in audiophile perfection? I await your discussion.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 22:03:16 +0000
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