• Welcome to ASR. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Dr. Toole Nominated [Now Appointed] for Order of Canada!

Congratulations!!!
Very proud the GG has honoured Dr. Toole. Most deserving!

My very first engineering internship was at NRC in Ottawa, the campus beside CSIS. The bus was mix of these civil servants; I would watch and wonder "who is the scientist and who is the spy?" On reflection now, I should have also asked "who is both?"

Welcome back to Ottawa, Dr. Toole, where you can now safely debrief your Canadian handlers. Thanks to your precious contributions to our national security, Canada will be able to seamlessly transition to an almond and grape economy once the ice caps melt.
 
Big congratulations to the scientist @Floyd Toole for all he has done for audio and with the Order of Canada!

Peter Aczel's (1927-2017). founder and editor of The Audio Critic, presented a list "The following audio people have our trust. When you see one of these names, you don't have to proceed with caution." (these people were called 'The White Hats') . Floyd Toole is on that list and this is Aczel's characterization of him:
"The man who codified the controlled subjective testing of loudspeakers and the listening/measuring correlation. His scholarly work at Canada’s National Research Council laboratories was so basic and groundbreaking that Sidney Harman, whose appetite for audio talent is insatiable, just had to have him and his associate Sean Olive."


As a Revel Salon2 owner, I enjoy Floyd Toole's work every day and I wish him a great retirement.
 
As a Canadian, I totally approve Dr. Toole's nomination. Congratulations to Dr. Toole, a true pioneer in the complex science of sound reproduction.
 
Last edited:
Congratulations, Doc! Hopefully this adds another satisfying layer to a very well-earned retirement.
 
Floyd Toole said:
Indeed, these are difficult times for many branches of science. When I was headhunted to join Harman as Corporate VP Acoustical Engineering in 1991 I was not looking for a job, but the reason I was intrigued by the offer was that for the preceding few years our NRC budgets had been reduced, and we were encouraged to seek funding from industry connections. A few years before I left I had organized a contractual relationship between a non-profit consortium of Canadian manufacturers and the NRC to share funding of continued research - the Athena project. Clearly, science was losing support from the politicians.

Harman was an unknown factor, but an interesting change. The fact that Sidney Harman and my management colleagues went along with my proposal to set up a corporate research group - to continue the research, not to design products - was simply amazing. That they allowed us to publish the results was extremely generous, as setting up and running the operation cost millions of dollars over the years. We had excellent facilities. Telling the scientific story was very helpful in dealing with automobile manufacturers (real engineers) although it likely had little effect on the consumer market as it was not strongly promoted. Automotive audio and informatics accounts for about 75% of Harman's business.

It is all gone now, the group retired, and management has been completely changed. One can only wonder if any of it could happen in today's social and financial climate. I think we were very, very lucky to have done it when we did. Long-term considerations often challenge the next quarterly returns. The world is now a different place.
Click to expand...
Congratulations Floyd! I have been following your amazing research ever since I sent away for your slender book containing a collection of your research papers from 1981 - 1986 called "Subjective and Objective Measurements of Loudspeaker Performance". (I always wondered about the identity of the 5 highest rated speakers in that book - although I understand the top rated one was the Energy 22 Reference so I eventually procured a pair). Perhaps that book, which I still own, was eventually what evolved into your Sound Reproduction, The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers, Rooms and Headphones book series, which I own as well. You continue to be an inspiration and one of my major sources of audio knowledge. Congratulations again and thank you for all you have done in the audio reproduction field for us all!
 
Floyd Toole said:
Hello everybody, and thank you for your kind words. I am feeling that it has been a life well spent. It is not over, but the hard work has been done and it continues to be a pleasure to share opinions and knowledge with members of the ASR.

Both Rex Anderson and Newman are correct about my changed living situation. I left a large complicated Atmos media room/home theater, pool, garden, etc. in a house in California, to simplify life in a large luxury condominium in Ottawa, Canada, where my new wife and I lived for many years, and where we have numerous friends and memories. It is "home".

My present media room provides gratifying entertainment, while respecting the privacy of our neighbours who are only 10 inches of reinforced concrete away. So, cinema sound levels are no more, but as it turns out age has reduced the attractions of very loud sounds. My hearing is not what it used to be, tinnitus is a constant accompaniment, but I function well without hearing aids - noisy restaurants remain a challenge though. As I often point out, binaural hearing degrades along with, or even independent of, conventional hearing threshold shift. The judgment of sound quality is long past. I still have opinions, but they are my own, not for sharing.

Life is now music, movies, books, sharing space with interesting people, and as much travel as our bodies will allow for as long as possible.

Cheers, Floyd
Click to expand...
Congratulations on the award! and writing your new book which I have just started reading. It prompted me to start improving my knowledge and understanding about the science of hearing particularly the ability of the human's to recall the sounds that they have previously heard for example in speaker comparisons.

I've already read quite a bit about the echoic memory, but the research field is very wide so its a bit hard to know where to start:facepalm:

I wondered if you have any reading material recommendations or names of credible researchers working in the field of "music memory" as it pertains to things like ABX test methods etc? This topic must have been an on-going debate in your career!

Best wishes on your retirement and achievement of getting a well written book finished and published.

I retired also from R&D as a Terrestrial/Satellite Comm Engineer recently and picked up a renewed interest ( I built Siegfried Linkwitz loudspeaker system published in Wireless World in 78 when I was a teenager) in sound reproduction in my spare time -which I have a lot of now:)
 
Last edited:
As far as I'm concerned Dr. Toole is the man who first endeavored to crack the Circle of Confusion. There were others with the idea I'm sure before him, but he's really the one who put it all together in a manner that was digestible by the masses and changed everything about the hobby going forward. He decoded the fundamental mysteries of Sound Reproduction and has consequently removed me and many others from the merry-go-round of gear acquisition and disposal plus drew a treasure map for manufactures to improve their wares. For a couple decades I spent endless hours frustrated with trying to figure out what was wrong with my system's sound. Immeasurable tinkering, "upgrades" and modifications never brought satisfaction. Now I've learned to buy the right gear and just enjoy my media without feeling any sense of shortcomings. A couple of young companies have emerged, abiding by the research and creating products better than I would have imagined 20 years ago and they're getting quite affordable. We are all indebted to this man. Most likely none of us would be on this site and this site would be unlikely to even exist without him (and obviously Amir). He's pretty much the Jimi Hendrix of Sound Reproduction.

Thank you Dr. Toole.
 
Waveform Fidelity said:
It prompted me to start improving my knowledge and understanding about the science of hearing particularly the ability of the human's to recall the sounds that they have previously heard for example in speaker comparisons.
Click to expand...
Waveform Fidelity said:
This topic must have been an on-going debate in your career!
Click to expand...
Without putting a name to it 60 years ago, it was obvious from the very first listening test that instantaneous comparisons were exceptionally revealing of differences between loudspeakers and living with them led to adaptation to, normalizing, what were horrendous colorations at the time. When doing positional substitution comparisons there was a silent interval between comparisons, of the order of 3 seconds, which would be a factor, but in practice did not seem to degrade the ability to discern important differences. So echoic memory is definitely real. I didn't pursue the underlying perceptual mechanisms.
 
Thanks very much. I have never experienced a speaker comparison test - the closest to that was many years ago at the BBC working in the sound studios (for just a year) where we would walk to/from the control room to the studio to listen to the real sound of the musicians and the sound coming over the studio monitors. Both rooms were damped, so maybe similar, but the sounds just sounded “very different” the tonal balance was approximately the same but the larger acoustic size of the source(s) (the musicians separated in space) vs the loudspeakers gave the game away. It took about 3 seconds to walk back and forth!
 
Waveform Fidelity said:
It prompted me to start improving my knowledge and understanding about the science of hearing particularly the ability of the human's to recall the sounds that they have previously heard for example in speaker comparisons.

I've already read quite a bit about the echoic memory, but the research field is very wide so its a bit hard to know where to start:facepalm:
Click to expand...
I am going out on a limb here to expose my extremely limited understanding in this area :oops:. I believe one of the well known researchers in this general area (capacity of short term memory) is professor Nelson Cowan.

Nelson Cowan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

I haven't has a chance to read this Cowan's paper beyond its abstract yet. It seems an interesting but very long read (99 pages including references).
[Edit] Now I see it :facepalm:. The paper was 28 pages. It was followed by 60+ pages of "peer commentaries".

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity - Volume 24 Issue 1
www.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org

He also wrote a much shorter article on auditory memory.
https://memory.psych.missouri.edu/a...wan2019_ReferenceWorkEntry_AuditoryMemory.pdf
 
Last edited:
NTK said:
I am going out on a limb here to expose my extremely limited understanding in this area :oops:. I believe one of the well known researchers in this general area (capacity of short term memory) is professor Nelson Cowan.

Nelson Cowan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

I haven't has a chance to read this Cowan's paper beyond its abstract yet. It seems an interesting but very long read (99 pages including references).
[Edit] Now I see it :facepalm:. The paper was 28 pages. It was followed by 60+ pages of "peer commentaries".

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity - Volume 24 Issue 1
www.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org

He also wrote a much shorter article on auditory memory.
https://memory.psych.missouri.edu/a...wan2019_ReferenceWorkEntry_AuditoryMemory.pdf
Click to expand...
Thanks very much.

As a Comm engineer I think of Echoic memory as a kind of persistence, a bit like an oscilloscope trace that provides the ability to see a signal waveform vs a single bobbing dot.
 
The idea so often propagated in the audiophile world, whether its reviews or whatever, that you have to live with a loudspeaker for a significant period of time… weeks months… before really understanding its character, has always seemed wrong to me.

Wrong intuitively, and wrong in terms of my own informal experience.

For instance, if I use my DAW to play a 1K tone at one level and then another 1K tone played at 2 or 3 dB louder, it’s only by quick switching between the two that people are going to detect a level difference.

If I play a 1K tone at one level, and you go away and come back the next day and I play it 2 dB louder, you’re not going to know which is which.

Quick switching just seems obviously more revealing of sonic differences, especially subtle ones. Why wouldn’t that be the case for comparing any sounds including those from loudspeakers?

It just seems reasonable that quick switching between loudspeakers would be particularly revealing of sonic differences and characteristics, just as Dr. Toole has confirmed.

This also suggests to me (inferring from the blind testing research and my own informal experience), that one can get a picture of the characteristics of a loudspeaker fairly quickly. It doesn’t take “ months of living with it” to unravel it’s hidden mysteries.

I’ve always found that my impressions of a loudspeaker once I’ve heard several tracks are formed quite quickly and remain consistent. I quickly perceive a certain combination of positives and possible liabilities in the performance.

And when I get those same loudspeakers in my own listening room for long periods, the issue isn’t that I will start to hear characteristics overtime that I didn’t pick up on earlier. I would still describe the speaker’s character, the same way. What living with the speaker tells me are things like whether the flaws are something that can live with over time, whether they become more annoying over time, or whether I can adapt to them over time in order to enjoy what I like about the speaker.

And on the subject of adapting to flaws: i’ve had some audiophile pals acquire a new loudspeaker and I have helped them set up that loudspeaker or listen to it very shortly after they had set it up. And for instance one of the speakers sounded distinctly a bit too bright to both of us.

Weeks later this audiophile tells me the speakers seem to have broken in overtime because they are no longer too bright.

So I drop over… and to me they sound just as they did when we first set them up. Too bright. I cannot detect any change at all.

Now this is unscientific since we have not controlled for sighted bias (or the issue of longer term audio memory)…. but I couldn’t help concluding that the speakers had not broken in - my friends brain had broken in; he had significant listening time to adapt to the brightness of the presentation, whereas I had not and so still perceived them as a bit too bright.

Anyway… I’m thankful to Dr Toole for having shed light on and brought hard data to many of these informal listening mysteries :-)
 
Last edited:
Personally, I have never believed in the break in period. But anyway, I have one last question about switching between each loudspeaker for comparison testing. Lest say you listen to loudspeaker A for 10 seconds, then switch to B, does the music rewind by 10 seconds as well? So that you are hearing exactly the same clip of music?
 
Waveform Fidelity said:
Personally, I have never believed in the break in period. But anyway, I have one last question about switching between each loudspeaker for comparison testing. Lest say you listen to loudspeaker A for 10 seconds, then switch to B, does the music rewind by 10 seconds as well? So that you are hearing exactly the same clip of music?
Click to expand...
As mentioned in my books and the slide show, it was necessary to create about 30s carefully segued loops of several kinds of music so that all loudspeakers were compared while listening to exactly the same program material. It degraded the entertainment value of the music, but it made the listening tests much more powerful. Listening to full musical selections while switching is clearly not as valid because the program is discontinuous - especially classical and jazz.
 
Floyd Toole said:
When doing positional substitution comparisons there was a silent interval between comparisons, of the order of 3 seconds, which would be a factor, but in practice did not seem to degrade the ability to discern important differences. So echoic memory is definitely real. I didn't pursue the underlying perceptual mechanisms.
Click to expand...
From years of taking such blind tests, the smaller the impairment, the shorter the delay needs to be. In the case of very small differences such as high bit rate lossy codecs, watermarks, generational loss, jitter audibility, etc., I have found that even half a second may be too long. The switching itself because an event that the brain notes and concentrates on vs what you are trying to find. Most powerful is when the switching is instant where this disturbance is not there and memory of the past event is quite fresh before and after the switch.

When I first took the blind test of speakers are Harman, I found the 3 to 4 seconds an infinity compared to what I was used to. But as you say, for speakers, the difference is usually quite large so it became a small nuisance and did not get in the way of making an assessment.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom