The Audio Engineering Society, Audio Fairs, and Audiophiles

Audio Engineering - May 1947

The term audio engineering was a relatively new one in the postwar period, so new that there was no publication devoted to it until 1947. Early that year, Radio magazine announced that it would be changing its name and focus to Audio Engineering, starting with the May issue. “Because there has been no technical magazine devoted solely to this field,” explained editor John H. Potts, “all engineers interested in audio engineering have had to gather piecemeal, from a large number of sources, such information on the subject as is published.”

The problem with no industry sharing of knowledge:

Cutting and mastering techniques had long been highly individualistic. Re- cording engineers did their best to mask the surface noise on records by boosting frequencies in the high ranges as the records were mastered (pre-emphasis); likewise, they rolled off the bass response to limit groove width. Each record and transcription company established its own “recording curve,” or “recording characteristic,” which meant that commercial phonograph records then had widely varying levels of volume and tone.

How could recording professionals and other audio-related industries arrive at standards if they had no recognized umbrella organization within which to effectively discuss and resolve these problems?

Letter

By the end of 1947, a letter appeared in Audio Engineering seeking all those interested in forming an “Audio Association.” Since they now had a magazine serving the neglected field of audio, was it not time to form an association similar in function and purpose to the IRE and the SMPE in their respective fields?82 A reply to the letter, printed in the following issue, stated that “a group of us, long active in broadcasting and recording, feel the same way. Audio engineering will be unhampered only when it has a society devoted exclusively to its needs— controlled by, and only to benefit, the audio engineer.

1948

At the third meeting, held in the same location on March 11 and considered the first official meeting of the Audio Engineering Society, renowned acoustical en- gineer and inventor Dr. Harry Olson of RCA gave a loudspeaker demonstration and technical paper on “Some Problems of High Fidelity Reproduction.”

The Audio Engineering Society, Audio Fairs, and Audiophiles

Edward Tatnall Canby

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