On Tue, 22 Dec 2015 21:26:20 -0000, MJC
wrote:
In article ,
says...
So, it might also have been possible to inspect the horns harmonic
content, if the player could hold a steady note.
Which reminds me that in a holiday job between school and college I
spent some time chatting up the test engineers who were checking an
audio amplifier. They just used a sine wave signal and listened on
speakers. So I leant on the speaker and whistled a beating note. The
technician spent a minute or two hunting for the source of the beats
until I ran out of breath and got chased out of the test bay...
Mike.
You're evil. I like that.
In roughly 1968, I worked in a shop that did warranty repairs on
various consumer audio equipment, mostly tape recorders. The owner
was rather cheap and decided we could do without much test equipment.
We had one ancient DuMont scope, which was only rarely used.
http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/dumont_la_oscilloscope_304_a304.html
When it came time to check for distortion or other audio anomalies,
instead of test equipment, we had Mario.
Mario had zero mechanical ability. Give him a soldering iron and he
was as likely to burn himself as solder the connection. If there was
a cable on the floor, he would find it and trip over it. If he tried
to fix anything, it was usually cosmetically ruined. Most of the
vehicles in the parking lot had dents from his futile attempts to park
his car. By all reason and logic, Mario was not suitable for working
in a repair shop.
However, Mario had amazing hearing. Not only could he detect and
identify many forms of audio distortion, but he could identify which
components were likely to be the cause. At one point, we hired a
clueless student, who knew little about electronics except how to
solder, to just replace the components that Mario identified. The
batting average was amazingly high. I even tried to trick Mario by
creating problems. He did quite well with up to four simultaneously
failed components. More was considered not worth repairing. When
Mario caught a cold or flu, we all took a short vacation, as nothing
was getting fixed using what little test equipment we had.
--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558