JBL Audio Engineering for Sound Reinforcement

Rating:
Summary: A compilation
Review: A compilation

Despite the editorial claim that" Audio engineering... is truly a book for the 21st century", I found it to be little more than a compilation drawn from other books - especially the classic Yamaha "Sound Reinforcement handbook" by Gary Davis and the "Master Handbook of Acoustics". In all fairness, one must admit that it is a difficult task to bring something new in a wake of the abovementioned standard works; nonetheless my expectations were high since the book under consideration bears the JBL name.

To begin with, it was unclear which audience the authors were targeting: the book is too general to be of any value to the sound professional while lacking sufficient descriptive detail to be useful for the beginner. The tone of the text sometimes also borters on the frivolous. For instance, on page 21 (chapter "Sound Attenuation with Distance Indoors") one finds "A good experiment is to have a friend stand in a fixed position in a moderately live room and talk in a clear voice". What should "a moderately live room" mean to a novice? A sound pro, on the other hand, will most likely have different definitions for what constitutes a "live" room. On the same page, a paragraph on "Standing Waves in Small Rooms" declares: "A standing wave may be set up between two parallel walls when there is a sound source located between them". The book would benefit if authors were to clarify what they mean by "set up", or if they were to provide some kind of working definition, such as "Standing waves are non-traveling vibrations of certain wavelength and frequency which occur in a medium of a whose size controls their wavelengths. It is amateurish how lightly the authors deal with fundamental issues in sound engineering!

In chapter 2 "Psychoacoustics - how we hear" there is another example of questionable validity under the JBL imprimatur: "Our ears do not always match our measuring instruments". If one follows this "logic", one could assume that "our eyes do not always match our measuring instruments" or "our feet to not always match our measuring instruments", and so on.

On page 214, in discussing with "Acoustic Gain, Needed Acoustic Gain and Feedback", the reader is advised to: "Measure the speech level at the farthest listener with the sound system turned off. Then, measure it again with the sound system turned on". Precisely how one is supposed to measure the "speech level at the farthest listener" with the "sound system turned off"? And where on the "farthest listener's' body should the measurement be taken?

On page 120 these two JBL engineers offer us a new term: "Mutual coupling". From the text one could deduce that authors actually referring to an acoustical coupling, which is by definition "mutual". (From Miriam Webster dictionary: MUTUAL: directed by each toward the other or the others; shared in common
COUPLING: the act of bringing or coming together)

There is a great deal in this book that is either unclear or of little value.
My advice to a prospective reader would be to buy Yamaha handbook instead or, for more details, get the unsurpassed Alton Everest's classic.