Peter Baxandall interview?

Hi folks:

Back at the end of 1979-beginning of 1980, Audio Amateur, as it was called then, published a 2-part interview with Peter Baxandall of tone-control fame. Is there someone here who has those magazines at hand? And if so, could you send me a PM? I need to ask about some statements which appear in it, and what pages they're on. Thanks!

Peace,
Paul

I remember one particular interview with PB from the mid-1980's... Where he talked about having some doubts about a capacitor's affect upon HF response in a preamp, so he made it switchable... then made a test recording, and discovered upon re-opening the box that he'd only connected one wire to the switch...

Not sure if it's the same interview or not, but I'd LOVE a copy, if anyone has that one.

-I suspect it MAY have been in Studio Sound magazine, but can't be sure.

Keith

Paul, Keith,

I think a good route to try, or at least a good starting point, would be the Douglas Self
web site, he often refers to the work of PB. Perhaps he can help? Douglas is an approachable
guy. Try,

http://www.douglas-self.com/


Keith, Studio Sound in the 1970's - who was the guy who did hardware reviews and was
absolutely ruthless, especially when the gear was on the bench? I wish he was about today.


Frank

PM sent

Paul--
If John doesn't have you covered, I dug up my copies & have them sitting close to hand.

12volts said:

Paul, Keith,

I think a good route to try, or at least a good starting point, would be the Douglas Self
web site, he often refers to the work of PB. Perhaps he can help? Douglas is an approachable
guy. Try,

http://www.douglas-self.com/


Keith, Studio Sound in the 1970's - who was the guy who did hardware reviews and was
absolutely ruthless, especially when the gear was on the bench? I wish he was about today.


Frank

Click to expand...

Hugh Ford,,, he reviewed a product design of mine, and yes he was brutal... but correct.

JR

SSLtech said:

I remember one particular interview with PB from the mid-1980's... Where he talked about having some doubts about a capacitor's affect upon HF response in a preamp, so he made it switchable... then made a test recording, and discovered upon re-opening the box that he'd only connected one wire to the switch...

Not sure if it's the same interview or not, but I'd LOVE a copy, if anyone has that one.

-I suspect it MAY have been in Studio Sound magazine, but can't be sure.

Keith

Click to expand...

The cap story wasn't in this interview, and he is actually pretty down on reported subjective differences between amplifiers or inadequacy of bench testing. There is one anecdote in the interview about him being invited to a blind listening test, and after he readjusted the gains to match, nobody heard a difference any more between the two amps.

My favorite part was him dissing the invention of new names for slew related distortions (TIM etc). PB worked in radio and RADAR equipment design, so the relatively slow audio waveform was easy lifting compared to that. He felt it was already common knowledge to those skilled in the art for decades, and he was saying this in 1979.  8)

JR

PS: I am still disappointed because i tried to hook up Ed Dell to interview Rudy Bozak (of the speaker company with the same name) for TAA. I consulted with Bozak before, and was friends with Rudy after he sold his business and retired (for health reasons). Ed expressed interest but unfortunately Rudy died before I could get them together (in the early '80s).

John sent me the information I needed. I was looking for the part where Baxandall noted that he'd never made a nickel from the tone control design, other than the small fee he was paid by Wireless World for writing the article describing it. A manufacturer did send him half-a-dozen center-tapped pots, though.

What I needed to know was which part of the interview contained that quote, and on what page. John supplied the information. Thanks, John!

Peace,
Paul

He also won a wristwatch prize (worth 10 pounds). That tone control is one of those milestone circuits, while he did a lot more than just that and probably didn't appreciate that being his namesake accomplishment.

On the subject of patents, while PB never patented that basic circuit, I actually patented a variation on it years later (US05509080) in 1998 in connection with a fixed install mixer/amplifier design I did. I added a pair of back to back clamp diodes across the bass boost leg of the typical "Baxandall" tone circuit. This was used in the fixed install/background music market, where using lots of bass boost was useful to make the crap ceiling speakers sound better at modest listening levels, but you didn't want high level bass content to saturate the constant voltage (70-100V) distribution transformers. The simple diode clipper sounded much better in use than you would expect because the tone control circuitry already split the LF and HF audio into two paths, so the bass clipping didn't step on the normal HF content which passed through unmolested and effectively masked the bass clipping which was LPF by the tone control topology.


JR

edit/ In hindsight, IIRC I got paid $1 for assigning my patent to my employer, so PB made more money off the basic invention then I did for my patented variant...    /edit