Who would you hang ...

[SEAWOLF97]

.
with for a day (from the audio world - either production/design/theory/tech) ... to experience/learn what you could from that person ? why ?

I was going to say "pick one" , but that's not really possible ..so limit to 5 or so.

Was thinking about my own answer to this question and came up with

George Martin , the Beatles producer ..he really shaped it. So much to learn from him.
George Harrison , in addition to guitar , he was an amateur race driver. some beers and a fun day.
Thomlinson Holman ...THX , I read his manual on my AptHolman preamp and he has an interesting and informative style that was enjoyable. So much to learn there.
Edgar Villchur ...incredibly smart audio inventor. One of the pioneers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Villchur

Am sure that many other names will pop up as this gets thought out further ...

Who would you ?

[Mr. Widget]

James Martini: aka James B. Lansing
Paul Klipsch
Rudy Bozak
Dr. Amar Bose

[DavidF]

Thomas Edison. My Grandfather worked at Menlo Park for a time and had some interesting stories about the experience and about the man (he didn't work with Edison but he was still around).

Paul Klipsch. varied interests, a true contrarian with a sense of humor.

Tom Dowd. As with George Martin, he as access to so much inside knowledge of some of the seminal music of my generation. Also, he has access to some cool audio toys.

E. H. Scott of the 20's and 30's (not the later-to-com H. H. Scott). His company was tagged the "Stradivarius of Radio" and he was another eccentric with a desire for perfection. He produced equipment without peer in the 30's.

[SEAWOLF97]

Thomas Edison. My Grandfather worked at Menlo Park for a time and had some interesting stories about the experience and about the man (he didn't work with Edison but he was still around). .

IF I thought that comprehension was remotely possible, my answer would have been
Nikola Tesla.

PBS ran a show that featured the AC\DC (no, not the group) standards wars between NT & TE. Fascinating story. Edison played a bit dirty in that one.

BUT, then Tesla mutilated his manhood so not to be distracted from his work by women.

Wow, talk about dedication ....

[martin2395]

My first choice would be Nikola Tesla, for sure.

The other 4(in no particular order) would 've been:

- Bob Carver
- Dan D'Agostino
- Greg Timbers
- Nelson Pass

[SEAWOLF97]

My first choice would be Nikola Tesla, for sure.

The other 4(in no particular order) would 've been:

- Bob Carver
- Dan D'Agostino
- Greg Timbers
- Nelson Pass

I have a friend who DID hang out with Bob Carver for a day.

He bought a pair of Carver Amazing speakers that had an issue. somehow he found Bob's email address and asked abt them. Carver lives just up the coast about 150 miles and replied "bring them on up, we'll fix them" ... He did, they did. Spent the day in his garage and even had lunch.
Bob even autographed them when they were repaired.

[DavidF]

IF I thought that comprehension was remotely possible, my answer would have been
Nikola Tesla.

PBS ran a show that featured the AC\DC (no, not the group) standards wars between NT & TE. Fascinating story. Edison played a bit dirty in that one.

BUT, then Tesla mutilated his manhood so not to be distracted from his work by women.

Wow, talk about dedication ....

Tesla was all about science with a brilliant mind. Yes, way over my head. Edison was much more of a practical thinker, more with what I could relate to. But, yeah, likely still way over my head. From what I have of his personality you could as likely want to choke him at some point as not, at any given moment. Still he had a group of clever and creative people working around him for many years and there was something in the works at all times.

[Ducatista47]

In audio?

Harry Nyquist. The Tesla and the Edison of audio, and data handling, and a whole lot more, he really contributed on that level. A theoetical genius who was so practical that he didn't bother to prove many of his developments. All he cared about was that they could be used to create almost everything that mattered in audio and signal transmission and reproduction. Decades later others would come up with the proofs, and prove it all they did. Nothing has been refuted, to my knowledge. The torrent of hardware that flooded from Bell Labs and Western Electric was the direct application of his ideas.

Alexander Graham Bell. Come on.

Jim Lansing, certainly.

Nelson Pass. I use his stuff every day, and chances are it sounds at least as good as your stuff.

Alan Kimmel. The other amplifier design engineer I most respect. I have had a phone conversation with him and limitted correspondence, but we have never met in person. He is an incredibly nice man.

Jerry Moro. I want to know how the hell he came up with the low distortion transducer designs for JBL. Given ​what Mr. Lansing did for the design and manufacture of speakers, I consider Moro the bearer of his legacy.

Greg Timbers. I don't have to explain here, just jump on the bandwagon.

And, the guys at Stax in Japan, and the JVC crew who came up with the K2 system for XRCD. And any Japanese mastering engineer who has ever used it.

Jim Anderson. He records Patricia Barber, and others.

Todd Garfinkle, musician and MA records in the flesh. I met him this year, but a day would be great, especially a recording remote day. Why? Listen to his recordings...

I am not entirely saddened by not being able to hang with Tesla because I did get to spend a half day with R Buckminster Fuller. How could I complain?

But I would so much more wish to hang with the musicians I consider the most accomplished.

[tesla]

Nikola Tesla gets my vote also. Practically our whole word-wide society is based on his inventions helped by Westinghouse and strangely enough, Marconi. Why Marconi? Even though he stole virtually everything he did from Tesla, he did help to commercialize Radio, something that Tesla seemed not to care about.

Richard Feynman

Need I say more?

My Father one last time. (he died about a month ago and was a mechanical engineer, and fantastic human being. I will be forever indebted to him.

IF I thought that comprehension was remotely possible, my answer would have been
Nikola Tesla.

PBS ran a show that featured the AC\DC (no, not the group) standards wars between NT & TE. Fascinating story. Edison played a bit dirty in that one.

BUT, then Tesla mutilated his manhood so not to be distracted from his work by women.

Wow, talk about dedication ....

[Horn Fanatic]

Harry Olson, who put theory into practice.

Don Keele, who is our last living legend.

Don Davis, who put in practice the works of Wallace Sabine.

Vincent Salmon, who gave us the hyperbolic equation.

A. Neville Thiele and Richard Small for publishing loud speaker design parameters which were once the domain of acoustical engineers and physicists.

The genius Paul Klipsch has already been mentioned.

Wente, Thuras, Bostwick, Blattner...

The list is endless!

[1audiohack]

Starting with famous dead guys:

Richard C Heyser, a JPL senior staff scientist and audio guy who in 1967 created a super hetrodyned audio measurement devise that allowed for complex acoustical measurements in the presence of noise. This system was made portable by Gerald Stanley of Crown Audio and Don Keele at Techron. Richard was a guy who really got it.

Edwin Howard Armstrong, The real creator of audio and RF amplification. Friend of Paul Klipch and a paul bearer of Nicola Tesla. Another guy who really got it.

Harry Nyquist, Human super mind who created a single graph that at once shows the real part, the imaginary part, the magnitude, the phase, the frequency and the identification of minimum and non minimum phase of an acoustical or electrical measurement, in about 1925 if I remember correctly.

Dr Eugene Patronis, Professor emeritus in the school of Physics at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. I don't think there is anything electrical or acoustical that he doesn't understand.

Doug Jones, Professor emeritus Columbia College because he really understands small room acoustics, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. Oh and the fact that I really like him.

Don Davis, Who while at Altec created RTA with his own money commissioning HP to build it for him when the genius's at Altec decided it would be of no benefit. And a whole lot more. The last time I talked to Don, we just talked about road racing.

Tom Danley, because he is a true pioneer in our time, and is a lot of fun to be around.

Jerry Morro, because he know the answers to all my transducer questions and is a nice guy.

Greg Timbers, because he knows all the answers to my integration questions, and is a nice guy too.

You said five or so, so,,

Barry.

[Ducatista47]

My appologies to Jerry Morro for apparently leaving an "r" out of his name. I only saw it in print once, some years ago. And I am no longer a great speller. My further regrets for listing double the suggested number of luminariies.

As for Mr. Fuller, I feel the need to mention that he was almost certainly one of he greatest and widest ranging thinkers of his century. The portrait painted of him by the press didn't even touch him, and up close and personal it was obvious that he was in a league of his own. One of his greatest strengths was to effortlessly answer important questions that no one else even thought of asking. He was also a master of integrating pretty much everything, and to great practical effect. There is a reason why synergy is a word most closely associared with him.

The night before, in a massed assembly of an entire college, he stopped talking and looked up at no place in particular for perhaps half a minute, completely motionless. Most of the audience, who gave him their complete silence by the way, began to think he had forgotten what to say next. His resumption was otherwise normal, and the next day, upon closer observation of how he moved through time, I realized that he had needed to do some very big thinking about something which had just occured to him and couldn't wait for later. I have to wonder how many of those present ever realized what a once in a lifetime moment they had witnessed. Not exactly a Jersey Shore cast member puzzling over nail polish colors.

At the risk of complete paralizing reader boredom, I should explain that while Fuller's writing was precise but dense by ordinary standards, his in person explainations were lucid and immediately comprehensible. As an example, when asked questions he would explain that he felt obligated to give the best, most complete answer he was capable of. In our tiny group in a tiny auditorium the next day (in the engineering building), when asked a simple question about a particular geometric solid's property, he gave a precise and simple answer. That was from a know it all math professor with a big ego trying to trip him up. When asked an intelligent guestion about geometric relationships he gave a two hour answer in which he blackboarded his entire, nearly, developed ideas involving geometric relationships and their bearing on the question. In other words, he shared with all eight or ten of us the entire development and implications of his work with mathematics relating to geometry. If only it had been filmed. The way he presented it from the ground up, any reasonably intelligent second year high school math student would have understood everything.

And what ideas. Remembering him as the inventor of the geodesic dome and a few tinkered odds and ends in like reporting the Titanic disaster as iceberg one ship zero. Given the societal and ecological implications of his work, such shorrt shrift is throwing away a gigantic, incredible gift.

I guess I used to be smart back in those days too. Damned old age.

[Doctor_Electron]

Drew Daniels

[Mannermusic]

Drew Daniels

Yes! Would have loved to work on the Saturn V launch simulation project at Epcot Disney Land in Fl. Even had a place to stay.

[SEAWOLF97]

Whoaa ...thanx for the memory jog. I went to one of Bucky's lectures at UCSB on my father's recommendation (1967 or 8) . Dad said that this will be the most brilliant guy you'll ever meet. I was just a HS senior. His presentation was comprehensible to me ( I was smart back then) , and seemed like the same stuff that I was reading in the Popular Science mag predictions..

As for Mr. Fuller, I feel the need to mention that he was almost certainly one of he greatest and widest ranging thinkers of his century. The portrait painted of him by the press didn't even touch him, and up close and personal it was obvious that he was in a league of his own. .

Don't just take our recommendations on "Bucky" , check what the world says about him , tho he never graduated from college.

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American neo-futuristic architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.

Fuller entered Harvard University in 1913, but he was expelled after excessively socializing and missing his midterm exams. Following his expulsion, he worked at a mill in Canada, where he took a strong interest in machinery and learned to modify and improve the manufacturing equipment. Fuller returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1915 but was again dismissed.

Throughout his life, Fuller found numerous outlets for his innovative ideas. During the early 1930s he published Shelter magazine, and from 1938 until 1940 he was science and technology consultant for Fortune magazine. During the 1940s he began to teach and lecture at universities, including Harvard and MIT, and in the late 1950s he became a professor at Southern Illinois University (SIU), where he and his wife lived in a geodesic dome when he was in residence. In 1972 he was named World Fellow in Residence to a consortium of universities in Philadelphia, including the University of Pennsylvania. He retained his connection with both SIU and the University of Pennsylvania until his death. He was the author of nearly 30 books, and he spent much of his life traveling the world lecturing and discussing his ideas with thousands of audiences. Some of Fuller's many honors highlight his eclectic reputation: For example, because he sometimes expressed complex ideas in verse to make them more understandable, in 1961 he received a one-year appointment to the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard. After being spurned early in his career by the architecture and construction establishments, Fuller was later recognized with many major architectural, scientific, industrial, and design awards, both in the United States and abroad, and he received 47 honorary doctorate degrees. In 1983, shortly before his death, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, with a citation acknowledging that his "contributions as a geometrician, educator, and architect-designer are benchmarks of accomplishment in their fields."

After Fullers death, when chemists discovered that the atoms of a recently discovered carbon molecule were arrayed in a structure similar to a geodesic dome, they named the molecule "buckminsterfullerene."



https://bfi.org/about-fuller/biography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

too bad that he was so busy, that audio did not come up on his radar.