Abstract
THE inaugural meeting of the 1933-34 session of the British Radio Institution was held at King's College, London, on September 22, when Dr. L. E. C. Hughes gave a lantern lecture entitled ‘Reproduction of Sound via Radio’. Dr. Hughes introduced his topic from the system point of view, indicating that many mistakes have been made in the past in concentrating too closely on particular details of broadcasting, forgetting that other sound reproducing systems have overlapped and provided information which could be turned to use in the system under discussion. It is most desirable that the general conditions required for good reproduction of sound should be applied uniformly not only to sound-systems as a whole but also to the component parts. In this way, all departures from the ideal criteria for reproduction can be assessed. Of greatest importance are the response curves of microphones and loud-speaking receivers, not only the response relating to the actual power output as compared with the input power, but also the distribution curves indicating the response of the units in different directions. Dr. Hughes outlined the methods of sound measurement which are in use for determining these response curves. At the moment, the basic calibrations by the Rayleigh disc and the thermophone are relied upon. The great difficulty is to ascertain what tolerances from the ideal criterion can be permitted. At present there is no standard loud-speaking receiver, whereas for head-phone reception of reproduced sound, the moving-coil receiver has long been a standard and is accepted internationally. The hope was expressed that a standard for radiated sound reproduction would be soon realised and a large amount of guess-work in estimating the quality of reproduction eliminated.
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Quality of Sound Reproduction. Nature 132, 509 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132509c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132509c0