Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

RE: One wonders how Dick Heyser would have felt about the following

Posted by tomservo (M) on January 28, 2023 at 12:03:00

In Reply to: One wonders how Dick Heyser would have felt about the following posted by geoffkait on January 28, 2023 at 06:02:44:

Hi

I only met him once and that was in company where i already felt too small to say much.

I can't say i understood much of what he said then either, I mean i understood most of the words but not enough to understand what he was talking about. That was the same for Dr Patronis at the table (turned out later he was a great guy and was a friend).

I can say being sort of a fan that Dick looked at things differently that those who only know "by the book". He was a Ham radio operator, those guys tend to tinker and get into how things work, he loved Hifi, wrote for Audio magazine, he worked at JPL and invented and made the gear that found a lot of the shuttle in the ocean. He invented the first measurement system that could measure a loudspeaker's anechoic response indoors and that was my involvement.

He saw measurements a little differently, in a cool way that was hard to grasp at first.

He said " we measure what we do because we can, not because they completely capture what we want to know" Think Total harmonic distortion, made sense in radio but not audio because there are so many variables in how much a harmonic stands out...or not at all.

He said Nature does not have units, we use time as a scale because we can divide it up neatly but it is not a universal scale. For instance any event at 20Hz takes 1000 times longer to happen than at 20KHz so measurements like Group delay must be considered in terms of what frequency it is (how long it takes).

Put it this way, he was the first person to figure out how to take an anechoic loudspeaker measurement including the acoustic phase indoors.
How does one exclude all the sound except the direct from the speaker?

If there was something he heard in the things you mentioned, i am sure he would pursue them if alive today. He was a brilliant scientist that rubbed some conventional academic types the wrong way related to making large leaps, but audio was his passion, he made his own tools when none existed and it's hard to stop someone like that...except in his case Cancer in 1987.

In a real way he was one of Audio's Tesla's, not recognized and argued against as he lacked the depth of academic credentials needed for high level ivory tower credibility.

Yeah great exclude him, "he lacked credentials" because he was recruited out of Cal-Tec to work for JPL on satellite technology.

Tom

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---