Book Recommendation: "Reproducing Sound"
I wouldn't normally offer a review of a book until I'd read it completely, but this one is going to take
forever to finish. It's not that it's dense, although it is that. Rather, it's because every chapter gives me something to ponder, so I have to put the book down and think about the lesson I've just read and its implications. Any book that makes you think beyond what's on the printed page is a treasure to be savored.
The title is particularly unexciting: "Reproducing Sound: Loudspeakers and Rooms" by Floyd E. Toole. It wouldn't jump out at you from the bookstore shelf. It has a bland, pastel green jacket that screams "boring textbook". Frankly, I might have passed it by if not for glowing recommendations by other authors. Which is why I'm writing this: for the serious student of all things audio, it would be a real shame to miss this ugly gem.
In a nutshell, it's a book about acoustics and speakers, but that doesn't do the breadth of ideas justice. The author talks about the philosophy of preserving the Art, with a capital "A", and what that really means. About "high fidelity", why it's always been a lie and why it's an impossible goal. About something he calls the "circle of confusion", e.g. speakers being evaluated by microphones that were evaluated by other speakers that were evaluated by other microphones ad infinitum.
Let me first say that this book isn't for everyone. It's not "Acoustics for Idiots" or "Speakers for Morons". Those kinds of books definitely have their place (the original template for that genre, "DOS for Dummies" was a brilliant piece of work). "Reproducing Sound" is for folks who've already drained the beginners' books of all they have to offer and are ready to move on to the next phase. I'd put it in the same league with "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest and "Mastering Audio" by Bob Katz.
Some of it is rather scholarly. Here's a representative exerpt:
What Haas [1972] discussed in his 1949 thesis, as well as studies by his contemporaries and those that preceded him (well summarized in Gardner 1968, 1969), was just the beginning. Recent research (e.g. Blauert, 1996; Blauert and Divenyhi, 1988; Djelani and Bauert, 2001; Litovsky et al., 1999) suggests that the precedence effect is cognitive, meaning that it occurs at a high level in the brain and not at a peripheral auditory level.
Some of it is fairly technical and assumes some prior familiarity with audio concepts, but most of it is highly accessible. If you understand the basic terminology of audio (e.g. "harmonic", "decibel" and "Q") you'll have no trouble following along. Best of all, there is very little math! Lots of graphs, but few formulas.
I like that the author does not pull punches or hedge his criticism of questionable practices with weasel words like "use your ears". He speaks with such authority (real authority, the kind backed up by annotated research) that you just know the B.S. factor is refreshingly low. For example, he makes a blunt but compelling argument against using Auratone-type lo-fi speakers for monitoring. Here's the short version:
It is disturbing to hear some people argue that they attribute some of the success of their prior recordings to a monitoring situation that is clearly aberrant...This is the kind of misguided argument that has led normally sensible people to promote the use of obviously "less than high-fidelity" loudspeakers for monitoring, on the basis that the majority of consumers will be listening through such loudspeakers.
It is true that the majority of consumers live with mediocre, even downright bad, reproduction systems. The problem is that it is possible to be "bad" in an infinite number of ways, so any boom box or rotten little speaker that is chosen to represent "bad" is just one example of how to be bad, not a universal reference."
In another chapter, he explains why comb filtering is really no big deal (at least, most of the time). Although Ethan Winer is still a hero of mine, I now understand why audio experts routinely criticize him for painting an over-simplified picture of comb filtering and its significance. In reality, comb filtering is around us all the time but we don't hear it. We can't hear it because most of the notches are too narrow to be audible, due to spectral masking. But the pictures used to sell absorbers make it look very scary.
Toole provides some great historical context, too, such as describing Edison's marketing of early gramophones with road tours featuring recordings side-by-side with the artist on the recording performing live. Interestingly, listeners often said they could not tell the difference! It just shows how the human brain has an amazing ability to fill in the blanks, so we don't notice what's missing. It's a common theme throughout the book.
Anyway, if you're hungry for info-meat and up for a slightly challenging read, I give "Sound Reproduction" two enthusiastic thumbs up.