Article; "Toward Microphone Transparency"

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

cuelist

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 21, 2004
Messages
248
Location
Sweden
I have managed to dig up a PDF of the quite intersting 1977 article "Toward Microphone Transparency" by Paul Buff, the inventor of the TransAmp transformerless mic preamp.

If anyone here wants to put it on their site for others to read, let me know and I'll send it right over. It's 8 pages and just over 900k in size.

I was in contact with Paul Buff just recently and among many interesting things he told me; "This (article) raised a lot of controversy because the bulk of the issue was not the TransAmp at all but, rather, my challenge of the methods of specification of theoretical minimum noise levels at the time."
 
It's an interesting article, although there are some howlers besides the spelling, grammar, and usage errors.

The number for the equivalent input voltage noise spectral density at each input of the preamp has to have a misplaced decimal point: surely it should read 0.5nV/root Hz and not ".05".

The claim that "The configuration effectively cancels most of the noise contributed by the transistor noise currents, when fed from a floating source" is highly unlikely to be true. But maybe some overzealous editor omitted some qualifiers here.

The resolution of the scan is a bit too low to make out the details of the graphs.
 
[quote author="bcarso"]The resolution of the scan is a bit too low to make out the details of the graphs.[/quote]

Yes... it wasn't my scans, I found the article by accident on Vintage King's site. It was 8 jpegs that I turned into a single PDF.
 
Talking of decent stuff on theire website...

If anyone ever wonders why I lament the passing of "Studio Sound" magazine, take a gander at this 1976 review of a dbx 160 by Hugh Ford:

http://65.61.24.253/pdf_files/dbx_160.pdf

As opposed to todays reviewers, who plug it across a snare drum and use words like "Warm" and "Strong", he measures it for everything from power voltage fluctuation acceptance to input bridge impedance... then compares his findings for comparable units.

Good old Hugh. -Warts and all get mentioned, manufacturers listen and even re-write spec sheets. -Not a "rich", a "vintage" or a "warm" in there... no ass-kissing, just the facts. Good ideas get praised, bad ideas get mentioned, with the proviso that manufacturers often pay attention and take action as a result.

...Design and production actually listening to knowlegeable engineers... is there really any better way?

Keith
 
I wasn't really aware of Studio Sound back when it was still in print. But I have seen scans of Steve Dove's "Designing a Professional Mixing Console" series; and if that's the caliber of material that was usually featured, then it must have been a superb magazine indeed!

I don't even bother reading "audio magazines" now because of the way they pander to their advertisers and their lack of material for the technically-interested.
 
Studio sound -just before it died- used to have 'Doctor Robert' or 'Doctor John' -I forget which... but it was a regular article on everything from components (describing properties of capacitors in excellently readable terms, -dielectric absorbtion for example) to relapping heads, or maintenance and update revisions for Studer machines.

In the 1960s it used to be called "Tape Recorder" magazine, and had one of the greatest articles ever written in it: "Tape Recoil" by 'professor' Stanley Unwin. Not many people know that the gentle speaker of gobbledigook was also an excellent DIY-er of tube electronics. -From memory:

Now biasey much of an import, and a reference to wavey forming would not be a mistress... Droppey half a dB over the hill of the peak and not far away... Always a deep twistey of the heatey wires to avoid a deep hummeymost in the bolves... now at long last for settley-down in your favourite armcheese for mutual enjoym of wifey rolling-pin."

Eddie Ciletti may be the closest thing we have to anything for the technically-interested, but people like Hugh Johns and Richard Elen were fantastic. They didn't necessarily intentionally set out to write technically-focused articles in the same way that Eddie does, but there's no getting around the fact that they knew so much, that they listened so carefully, that they actually checked manufacturers' claims and that they screamed "bullshit" when necessary.


Genius.

Keith
 
I´m reading Steve Dove´s article Consoles and Systems in G. Ballou´s Handbook f. Soundengineers at the moment. I´m really impressed and definitely would like to have more reading about console design. Are there any books from Dove available or has anybody a collection of his articles? Any other good readings around the subject console design?
:guinness:
 
Anyone has a scan of Steve Dove´s design articles?
Unfortunately in this part of the world I have zero chances to find them in paper form.

chrissugar
 
[quote author="jensenmann"]I´m reading Steve Dove´s article Consoles and Systems in G. Ballou´s Handbook f. Soundengineers at the moment. I´m really impressed and definitely would like to have more reading about console design. Are there any books from Dove available or has anybody a collection of his articles? Any other good readings around the subject console design?
:guinness:[/quote]

Steve has not written any books as far as I know, although the console article is long enough for a slim volume of its own.
 
[quote author="jensenmann"]Are there any books from Dove available or has anybody a collection of his articles? :guinness:[/quote]

I was in contact with Steve Dove last week. He has not written any articles since that time. He is now an independent consultant in the US, mainly working with digital audio processing (DSP's and such).
 
[quote author="cuelist"][quote author="jensenmann"]Are there any books from Dove available or has anybody a collection of his articles? :guinness:[/quote]

I was in contact with Steve Dove last week. He has not written any articles since that time. He is now an independent consultant in the US, mainly working with digital audio processing (DSP's and such).[/quote]

Yes, I remember when Steve was getting to the point of advising "convert it to bits and get over it." :razz: I guess there's no going back now....
 
Steve and I meet up about once every 5 years, generally over huge steaks in Smith and Wolenski's in NY. We have deep meaningful conversations about audio.... but I'm afraid he's a lost cause.... he firmly believes that he can (or is about to) do it all with bits, and no amount of intellectual protestation can sway him. Sad really! :roll:

Ted Fletcher
 
Back
Top