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Why do I think he's all about compression?

First of all, I did NOT say he was all about compression.

But what about this:

Electrical engineer James D. Johnston, a Morris Township resident, has been called the father of perceptual audio coding for his work in audio sound at AT&T Bell Laboratories since 1976.

Throughout the 1990s, Johnston invented a number of basic techniques which are used in perceptual audio coding...... MPEG (pronounced M-peg), is the name of the family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a digital compressed format. AAC is an audio compression format that is more efficient than MP3.

The major advantage of MPEG files..... is that MPEG files are much smaller for the same quality of sounds and images because they use sophisticated compression techniques. Johnston is hailed for making files smaller because he found a way to reduce the bit rate needed for transmission or storage of audio by a factor of ten or greater.

Seven of Johnston's patents related to this new technology were filed from 1991 to 1997.

Or this:
(http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r1/princeton-centraljersey/Sign_Pro/TheScienceofAudio2003.html)

Mr. James D. Johnston (F) received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1975 and 1976, respectively. Mr. Johnston is currently working in the Codecs group at Microsoft Corporation......He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 Audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC....

Now this is interesting, and NOT about compression:

Most recently, he has been working in the area of auditory perception of soundfields, ways to capture soundfield cues and represent them, and ways to expand the limited sense of realism available in standard audio playback for both captured and synthetic performances.

I'm certainly not debating that the guy is v.v. smart, and has done some really important work. All I said was that most of it has not been involved in improving sound, but has rather focused on the best way to compress data without degrading the sound (which is obviously a good thing).

The work of soundfield perception and reconstruction, on the other hand, could easily turn out to be hugely important to the ultimate realization of music reproduction. Time will tell.

Peter


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