President's Message
October 2001

00. Bernard Kingsley, who has been providing an invaluable service of running our website, has announced his retirement from the job. We are looking for persons to help on the website--please contact me if you're interested. (New Webmaster's Note: I am honored to assist in the operation of this website after being out of touch with the BAS for some 25 years [!] More about this soon.)

0. The latest issue of the BAS Speaker has been published, vol. 23 no. 4, which concludes the volume. If you subscribed starting vol. 23 no. 1 it is time to renew. It features meeting writeups of CES 2001, Owens-Corning Room Treatments, John Marks of John Marks Records, and Ron Coffin and his CoDrive Woofer; articles on LP cartridge comparisons, and testing the API S1 satellite and Eggleston Fontaine loudspeakers.

1. The NYT "circuits" section, How It Works, has a description of copy prevention schemes for video tape and DVDs. Inserting pulses in the vertical interval to confuse the brightness AGC circuits is already a familiar technique, "color striping" is new on DVDs and can even prevent the signal from passing through a VCR even if no recording is being made! 2Au01.

2. An ad for Stanton in Extreme Groove states "Not using a Stanton Turntable? Straighten Up!! Straight Tone Arms Virtually Eliminate Skipping." I had to read that several times to figure it out. It is aimed at disco djs, and that's "Straight Tone Arms", NOT "Straight Line Tone Arms". By eliminating skating force it is much easier to cue tracks, and the added distortion of the stylus not being tangent to the groove is not important in that application. (Fall 2000)

3. The number of DVD titles has exceeded 11,000, surpassing the catalog of laserdiscs at its peak (about 9,000). A list of all titles (242 pages!), downloadable as a .pdf, is at http://www.dvdinformation.com/titles/search.cfm. (The 2001 Movies Unlimited catalog lists 26,000 VHS titles: www.moviesunlimited.com).

4. The AES 20th International Conference has two papers on restoring old recordings: "J Pitch: A New Pitch Correction System for Degraded Historical Audio" is an operator-assisted pitch-correction system for dealing with magnetic tape anomalies due to tape stretch and other problems. "Resynchronism of Multiple Audio Sources" from CEDAR Audio Ltd. allows subsample accurate alignment of multiple sources, for example more than one copy of a disc. (John S. "accidental Stereo" Allen please note). The ARSC-IASA Conference 2001 has a paper by Peter Copeland of the British Library on synchronising two copies of a sound recording to optimise sound quality.

5. New research on tinnitus suggests that its origin may be in the brain rather than the ear because treatments that involved cutting the nerve from the ear to the brain failed to stop the ringing in some patients. One group of deaf patients could modulate the tinnitus by turning their eyes to the right or left. Brain scans indicate where the activity is located and perhaps lead to treatment. [NYT 21Au01]


 

The Boston Audio Society
PO BOX 260211
Boston MA 02126

problems? email Barry: webmaster@bostonaudiosociety.org

updated 11/11/04