Sound reproduction
by Floyd Toole · first published 2008
10mentions
4recommended by
6HN commenters
2017–2026first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
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…lot of the same material informally on Sean Olive's blog: http://seanolive.blogspot.com/ I strongly recommend you pick up the book Dr Toole wrote for a non technical audience: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... Learning from it will require you to shed the chip on your shoulder, but it will put you miles ahead of your peers in understanding what's actually going on when we listen to music…
on “No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price” ↗https://www.diyaudio.com/community/ is the main online forum. There's a fair bit of discussion over at parts-express.com's forums as well. There's a variety of books out there. Sound Reproduction by Dr Toole is a very comprehensive reference to the big picture, but doesn't really get into speaker and crossover design specifically. There's other books you can find for that, but I'm unaware of the…
on ““Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting” ↗If you want to read "the" book on sound reproduction, this is rather indisputably it: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... The book is backed by quite a few decades of research and controlled listening experiments with trained…
on “Building a high quality audio system [video]” ↗…counterparts. As rational minds might expect we don't live in such a world. You'd want to look into research by Sean Olive, Floyd Toole. Here's probably your best starting point: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... The TL;DR is that it turns out that most people prefer sound reproduction that (like video reproduction) is accurate to the source material, with a bit of a "house curve" that accentuates…
on “Modernizing my 1980s sound system” ↗> I strongly recommend you pick up the book Dr Toole wrote for a non technical audience: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... I second this recommendation. Chapter Two of Dr. Toole's book is titled "Preserving the Art" and directly addresses the concerns you're raising. He uses a great quote at the end…
on “No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price” ↗>The best acoustic devices in the world have been made and tuned by hand for thousands of years. Says who? You should really acquaint yourself with current research, starting with Toole's infamous "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms".
on “De-smarting the Marshall Uxbridge” ↗No mention of Toole? Obligatory considering the subject, even if it's about acoustics and not digital audio: https://www.routledge.com/Sound-Reproduction-The-Acoustics-a... And a talk by the author covering some of the material for those who prefer that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpUDuUtxPM
on “24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense” ↗…be annoyingly garbage and narrow with two-channel stereo. The subtle room reflections help a bit, and we rotate seating to make it a bit more fair. I read renowned Harman researcher Floyd E. Toole's 'Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms' and he seems to agree that there's not a whole lot that can be done about two-channel stereo. In fact, Toole rants in favor of three front…
on “Tokyo's audiophile venues (2016)” ↗…(b). (B) has been found to be the case even among people who make audio equipment for a living. People hear what they expect or want to hear, just like with vision. Edit: main reference: Floyd Toole, Sound Reproduction. Toole worked in an acoustics research lab for a Canadian government, and then ran Harmon Kardon's research lab for many years.
on “Vinyl LPs Sell More Than CDs for the First Time in 3 Decades” ↗…both. The research done by Floyd Toole and Sean Olive and others tells us that all other things being equal, listeners prefer speakers that accurately reproduce the input signal. https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo... But, I also agree 100% that gobs of power and accurate reproduction of those transients is also key to listener enjoyment and that this is something that is currently (no pun intended)…
on “History of the Nautilus loudspeaker” ↗