Golden Earring wrote: > Still catching up here. I hear you about Bell Labs, they were a big > outfit. I believe it was 2 of their engineers who inadvertently > discovered the Cosmic Background Radiation that resulted in the general > acceptance of the Big Bang hypothesis for the origin of the universe, > although they were trying to eliminate what they initially perceived as > interference with equipment they were using for a different purpose > altogether. Part of Bell Labs remit may well have included high quality > sound reproduction, but I should imagine that in those days the focus > would primarily have been on cinema sound systems rather than domestic > ones. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this. As I recall the DIY > approach to quality home sound reproduction was much in vogue through > the 50's & 60's with many people building their own amplifiers & > loudspeakers based upon freely available designs. Times have changed. >
Bell Labs in their glory days was a great place. I have had the pleasure and honour to visit a number of times, and to know and work with some of the research people there - and having grown up and worked in the technology industry in Finland, I still can't get my head around the fact that it is now "Nokia Bell Labs". There were two standard jokes about Bell Labs - one was "even the janitor has a PhD", the other, from the AT&T business people, "hundreds of wonderful technologies, not a single successful product". One has to remember that a lot of the research at Bell Labs was basic research, not directed at any specific product or business. So no, they didn't focus on cinema sound - they focused on things like the science of sound and hearing. Shannon's work was basic information theory. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley's work that led to the transistor was basic semiconductor physics research. The original Bell Labs was split up, most of it becoming Lucent Technologies (and retaing the Murray Hill location), but the voice-oriented stuff (including JJ Johnston's perceptual compression research that led to mp3) ended up in AT&T Labs in Florham Park "To try to judge the real from the false will always be hard. In this fast-growing art of 'high fidelity' the quackery will bear a solid gilt edge that will fool many people" - Paul W Klipsch, 1953 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Julf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=42050 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
