Audio Giants of the Audio Industry
Enjoy this quiz of matching these Audio Giants to their truly remarkable audio accomplishment.
Those of you seeking fame and fortune in audio should consider that longevity of such fame barely lasts past the recipient’s demise. However, since yours truly is deep into a “history of audio,” I thought some of you might enjoy participating in a quiz that challenges you to match this list of truly remarkable audio accomplishments to the accomplisher.
The men that accomplished them were giants that have endured in the annals of audio technology, textbooks, and papers. So, in the hope of entertaining you, encouraging you to appreciate your foundations, and the very real possibility that you have worthy contributions that may add to this list, try my Audio Giants quiz. Can you match the man (men) to the accomplishment? If you can, you’re on your way to becoming an Audio Giant.
1. Introduced a vacuum to the triode, correctly derived its performance, and built a successful amplifier that allows transcontinental telephony.
2. Built the most successful all-triode amplifier prior to WWII and which is still being built by enthusiasts for its superior sonic performance over anything available today.
3. Gave the definitive paper on Impedance in 1893. Present in the audience was Prof. Pupin at Columbia University, and with comments on the paper’s use of complex numbers from Steinmetz.
4. Complex number usage in the United States was taught and popularized by who.
5. The unique individual who through his own calculations, though not formally trained in mathematics, led to the wider use of LaPlace Transforms in audio.
6. Two men that were part of a team of giants that first demonstrated in the early 1930s three channel stereophonic sound over a 30 to 15,000 Hz system that could raise the level of a full symphony orchestra by +3 db.
7. The first man to fully explore and explain the fundamental behavior of RLC circuits.
8. The man, who with his usual complete analysis, arrived at the fundamental limits on digital recording parameters. This was, but one, of his myriad contributions to audio and no circuit designer that is not familiar with this work has a complete education.
9. An amateur scientist that among other things discovered an element in addition to outlining what sound is all about.
10. An Armstrong mentor and a teacher who earned big bucks by beating Mother Bell to the patent office.
11. The engineer of the coil that saved Bell Tel. $100,000,000 by 1922 in the cost of copper wire alone.
12. The man who watched “reverse props” on a ferry boat and conceived of negative feedback.
13. The co-designer of the first successful oscilloscope while a student at MIT, worked at General Radio, later Bell Labs, and finally established a successful post WWII audio company named after him.
14. He brought audio into the 21st century though he was not fortunate enough to see it. A NASA giant whose hobby was audio measurements.
15. A German engineer who by 1928 had successfully calculated the impulse response for all passive, linear filters.
16. The man who successfully raised audio power via bifilar transformers and gave his name to a famous audio company
17. The men who tried everything from Thermal to condenser loudspeakers and who gave us the reason to use cones.
18. A genuine patriot, the inventor of radio (literally) by developing the regenerative, Heterodyne and super heterodyne circuits, and finally his masterpiece FM
19. He developed the bass reflex speaker enclosure as well as the first full sized low frequency theater horns.
20. He fathered the most intensive and creative technological effort prior to the space race. In the process he delineated audio levels and set the standards for intelligibility in audio communications.
21. The man whose plots most of you use every time you measure a sound system
22. He was responsible for the development of the condenser microphone, the compression driver, and the multicelluar horn.
23. He built the first 20-20,000 Hz transformers for the motion picture industry. His transformers were indeed Peerless.
