| Meetings and other Notices |
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| The March Zoom Only Meeting |
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Date: Saturday Afternoon, March 15, 2025 4PM EST
Location: ZOOM Only
Topic/Activity: "Open-Source Sound: The Pi Speakers Approach to Loudspeaker Design"
Join us for a special presentation by Wayne Parham, president of Pi Speakers, as he shares his expertise in loudspeaker design, room acoustics, and high-efficiency speaker systems. Wayne is widely known for his work in constant directivity waveguides and high-performance speaker designs, particularly for home and professional audio applications.
A unique aspect of Pi Speakers is its commitment to open-source-style development. All Pi loudspeakers are provided in a manner similar to open-source software: research, design documents, blueprints, test plans, and results are published and open for inspection. While some proprietary technologies are used, they are still discussed in sufficient detail for anyone to understand. This transparency fosters a collaborative approach to speaker design and allows enthusiasts to learn, modify, and build their own high-performance loudspeakers.
In this session, Wayne will explore the principles behind Pi Speakers’ designs, the role of directivity control and waveguides in achieving smooth off-axis response and room integration, as well as crossover design, driver selection, and cabinet configurations. Attendees will gain valuable insights into how to achieve accurate, dynamic, and immersive sound reproduction.
Whether you're an audiophile, speaker builder, or simply interested in the science of sound, this presentation promises to be both educational and engaging. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear directly from one of the leading voices in open and innovative loudspeaker engineering!
Boston Audio Society
PO BOX 260211
BOSTON MA 02126
617.271.6588
Ken Schwarz is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Time: Saturday afternoon, March 15, 2025, 4:00 ~ 7:00 PM Eastern
Meeting ID: 882 5821 7159 Passcode: 266256
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Hope to see you then.
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THE BAS MESSAGE
March 2025 |
Miscellaneous News
1. The BAS is looking for a new webmaster. The current webmaster will train you and hand it over to you, and provide support as necessary. The website is written in simple HTML. You will need a computer and a high speed internet connection (you will need to download a 6GB backup in a reasonable amount of time). $300 is the annual payment. You may be asked to support admin of the BAS Facebook pages as well.
2. V45n4 of the BAS Speaker has been published. It features an extended interview (28 pp!) with Edgar Villchur by David Moran from 1985. Also the December 2021 meeting summary on Zoom and AV Recording by John S. Allen and Upscale Home AV by Kenneth Wacks
3. This is the 100th anniversary of the introduction of electrical recording, replacing the acoustical process. One of the most significant innovations in recorded music took place in New York City on Feb. 25, 1925. Art Gillham, a musician known as "the Whispering Pianist" for his gentle croon, entered Columbia Phonograph Company's studio to test out a newly installed electrical system. Its totem was positioned in front of him, level with his mouth: a microphone.
This was the moment when the record industry went electric. By the end of the year, a writer for the Washington, D.C. newspaper the Evening Star marveled at "the capitulation of the world's leading musical artists to the power of the microphone." (Hollywood's sound revolution with "talkies" wasn't far behind.) Today, a performer's microphone technique can help define their sound. Yet no plaque marks the spot where Gillham made history with the first commercially released electrical recording.
Singers had relied on vocal projection. Bessie Smith, feted as "the Empress of the Blues," called herself a "shouter." Al Jolson promoted himself as "the Blackface with the Grand Opera Voice." Although Jolson appeared in the pioneering talkie "The Jazz Singer," neither he nor Smith adapted well to the arrival of electrical recordings. Both were too set in their ways to adjust to the microphone's paradoxical qualities of detail and volume. With electrical amplification, the quietest person in the room can be the loudest.
Initially people thought electrical recordings sounded overly strident and tinny. They had gotten comfortable with the warm sound of the acoustical recordings.
But the public ear quickly acclimatized. Whisper singers evolved into crooners, and microphones migrated into concert halls. Rudy Vallée claimed to be the first singer to perform a live show with electrical amplification, in 1930.
[Curiously the article doesn’t mention that the simultaneous development of the electrical disc cutter was essential—DBH] NYT 25Fe25
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Below, other meetings and notices which
may be of interest to BAS members |
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JUST RELEASED !
A fantastic historical video!
Ken Berger and Kenton Forsythe are the founders of EAW (Eastern Acoustics Works) and they discuss, with terrific overlaid graphics, the history of, well, pretty much every audio thing Boston from the early 70's.
18 minutes and right here: https://youtu.be/fPfQEK0b0mI
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A Boston issue - As MIX magazine reports:
Sound Museum owners cry foul as their tenants likely secure new spaces without them
While the headline sounds like someone has sour grapes, the complete story of how the closure of this crucial Boston rehearsal studio is being handled is far more nuanced and complicated -- particularly since it brings up issues of gentrification, government support of the arts, non-profits' ethics and more. Full Story HERE (WBUR-FM Boston (1/11/23)
And here's an update:
www.wbur.org/news/2023/01/25/charlestown-rehearsal-studios-musicians-boston
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MAHLER 3
In the recent (April 2022) performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony at Boston's Symphony Hall by Ben Zander and his Boston Philharmonic, the recording was done with the three main spaced omnis with two more farther back. No accent mikes or chorus microphones were used nor, it turns out, were they needed. Remarkably, this produced a recording that is as close to the Symphony Hall experience as may be possible.
The info is here: www.bostonphil.org/concerts/2021-2022/bpo4-mahler3
Here is the recording in its entirety as a single .WAV file; 44k / 16 bit; 1hr 47 min
Mahler Sym 3 CD.wav 1.1GB
(For those of you with editing software note that the .wav file HAS markers to denote the movements.)
Here is the exact same Symphony 3 with the movements separated as FLAC files, 48k / 24 bit as a ZIPped file: Mahler 3 Zander as FLAC.zip 1GB
IF you'd like further Gustav Mahler info... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler
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Shop Talk
Shop Talk was a WBUR program about Hi Fidelity, music, speakers, tape recorders, etc. Enjoyed by many during the 1970s, the program's format was ‘talk’ and interviewing major audio luminaries. It was a forerunner of the popular program Car Talk!
Peter Mitchell and Dr. Richard Goldwater were the original hosts. They were later joined by Brad Meyer. Here, John Allen interviews Scott Kent:
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on SPEAKERS.mp3 (81Mb 1:27)
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on TAPE RECORDERS.mp3 (79Mb 1:26)
There is also an episode track on the BAS CD and here is that Description:
Track 12. "Shop Talk", WHRB-FM, November 5, 1984.
Peter Mitchell (on the left), Richard Goldwater, MD (center) and E. Brad Meyer (right) introduce the show with a 1932 stereo recording and prepare to talk with guests Mark Davis and David Moran, both then of dbx corporation.
Shop Talk, which through most of its ten-year life on WBUR featured just Mitchell and Goldwater, was the precursor of Tom and Ray Magliozzi's "Car Talk". As we finished our 9:00-10:30 stint every Saturday morning, Tom and Ray would take our places and begin joking with each other. Eventually the station manager figured out that they were funnier than we were, and that more people drove cars than owned hi-fi equipment, and fired us. Until then, the show publicized the Boston Audio Society, vastly increasing attendance at our monthly meetings. The show came back for a time during the '80's on the Harvard station WHRB, where we appeared once a month as guests of HRB stalwart David Elliott. [EBM]
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| BAS MICROPHONE CLINIC REPORT ! |
| In September 2009 the B A S held a microphone clinic, testing 37 different microphone models. The ambitious nature of the clinic effort, the extent of data collection, the number of individuals involved in microphone testing and in writing various sections of the report, and the complexity in determining how to construct the clinic report and make it available to members resulted it not being published until now. The dataset is extensive.
Representative samples were included in the abbreviated report in "The B A S Speaker"
(Fall 2015; v37n3)
Go to the MICROPHONE CLINIC PAGE for more...
...and don't forget, here is the master list of microphones in the world
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When collecting and plotting "noisy" data it is often useful to have Microsoft Excel plot a Trend Line through it. If that data is to be used for further work, it may be necessary to have an X-Y table of the Trend Line. That is not easy to get and this paper will show how to do it.
Joseph DeMarinis has an article here: Extracting Numerical Data from an Excel Trend Line
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Foster's Test Bench !
by Alvin Foster ! Click the logo: —> |
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The rapidly-becoming-famous BAS Headphone Test Article is now available in the BASS VOLUME 25, ISSUE 4, on Page 17, available HERE  PDF 3mb |
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Visit our PODCAST PAGE for:
The LIVE video podcast of our meetings,
Archived video of past meetings (only one so far!),
and Audio Podcast interviews by Alvin Foster |
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There is a supplemental and further explanation addendum paper to the E. Brad Meyer / David Moran paper published in the September, 2007 issue of the AES Journal. That page, which documents the experimental protocol and audio systems/source material is here:
www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm |
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| There is a Power Point Presentation of the lecture given by Dr. Barry Blesser at the March 2007 Meeting. The Meeting page synopsis is HERE; the Power Point Presentation (as a web page) is HERE |
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Some earlier BASS issues, previously available only directly by mail, are now available online, on the BAS SPEAKER page, HERE
Show your appreciation for the immense amount of dedicated work that went into both the original writing, gathering, editing and printing, PLUS the more recent scanning and conversion to PDF format, by joining the Society, HERE !
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A L L O F F S I T E L I N K S O P E N I N T O A N E W T A B O R W I N D O W
- AND FOR CONVENIENCE -
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