President's Message
July - August 1999

1. A summary of volume 20 of the BAS Speaker, prepared by Marc Perlman, is now on the website. Included in that volume are the CD Player Clinic, a presentation by Bob Stuart of Meridian, special Video and Home theater Section, and Alan Southwick on brownouts, interference and surges.

2. A followup on the low distortion oscillator: A circuit for measuring distortion below 0.001% is described in the August 1999 Electronics World. It includes a tuneable elliptic notch filter with a noise floor of 0.000025%.

3. I recently watched the engaging fantasy "Pleasantville". While the visual effects are seamless, the audio is badly done -- throughout the movie the ambience is totally dead, with Foley artists beavering away making sounds corresponding to what we see. Also from time to time the voices have a tubby quality due to directional microphones held too close. There is a 2 hour director's commentary about the making of the visuals (on the DVD release), but not a word about the audio production. For contrast, watch any film by Robert Altman—he obviously cares very much about the audio side of films.

 

 


 

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updated 11/11/04