Intro to Andy's Blog

Andy W — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 12:45:00 GMT

It was early in high school when my interest in engineering gravitated to electrical engineering and music (audio). My BSEE degree is from Purdue (at Indianapolis) and I spent the early years of my career at a small electronics factory near Cleveland where I designed safety controls for gas appliances. A desire to be nearer to home and in the audio field led me to Klipsch in May of 2000.

Since Klipsch fans are many times tweakers by nature, I’m sure to get a lot of disagreement here in this blog, even among my own colleagues, but such is the nature of audio! But my hope is that I’ll have topics to talk about aside from audio and/or engineering too.

I wouldn’t consider myself a tweaker per se, but it’s my nature to get inside of things and have a look around. And if there’s something that can be fixed, I like to fix it myself. Mostly because I’m a tightwad, but also because I want to know that it was done correctly.

My assumption is that the reader is reasonably familiar with audio and engineering terms. But if not, there’s always Google.

On the topic of assumptions, sometimes they can be a very bad thing. Rather it’s the preconceived notions and biases that sometimes get us into trouble, but biases can also be the essence of what a new product becomes. Everybody has preferences though, and selling you something you like is a good business practice, don’t you think?

For example, if I were designing a new car and I started by drawing circles for tires, would I be guilty of bias toward round tires? Perhaps square tires would look better with the particular body style I wanted. There are some things in designing and engineering that just work better, and the tradeoffs you make are as much based on experience, whether through years at a factory or a research project, as they are based on design criteria from Marketing, Product Development, or ID, and many times bias.

Lately the acoustic engineers have been running a series of blind A/B listening tests and the results have been revealing. The process is simple… choose the pair of speakers you prefer, and make notes and comments while listening. They don’t tell you what you’re listening to or how much it costs. Sometimes the results are surprising; sometimes they aren’t. The blind test helps you to be honest… or rather it helps prevent types of bias. And it factors out expectations based on size, looks, brand, or other visual perceptions. It’s the kind of honesty you can’t get from the pages of a magazine, or even an online review.

And we don’t just use “golden eared” listeners; we have listeners from customer service, and accounting, and IT. We can also do A/B comparisons on different drivers, horns, and crossover networks.

One of my favorite A/B tests so far included a new Klipsch bookshelf speaker versus a similar competitor (well known and highly respected brand). I was stunned, no, I was blown away when I found out that the speaker was our new 10” tall bookshelf model. To my ears it sounded much larger. The only complaint I had on my comment sheet was that I couldn’t play it louder… but that’ll be taken care of when it’s paired with a subwoofer and won’t be tasked with the low bass notes from the bottom two octaves. Oh, and when the results came in from all the listeners it was a unanimous decision. That was a first.

Hey, maybe agreement is possible in audio after all!

Andy's Blog : bias

Intro to Andy's Blog