Allison on Soundfields

[soundminded]

And your products reflect what?

You obviously haven't read my patent. My product represents an unpublished mathematical analysis and method to analyze, measure, and engineer acoustic fields and relationships between different components of acoustic fields. The model takes an entirely novel approach and is not an approximation or a compromise. I see the forest and the trees. My goal is no longer to merely to recreate the acoustics of the great concert halls of the world electroacoustically in other places but to beat them at their own game. The power of this model allows me to analyze and evaluate other people's efforts with an entirely different perspective.

[Robert_S]

[. . .] perhaps with careful adjustment, your equipment could be made to sound like one or a few instruments as they might be heard if they were in your room. That's still a very tough problem.

Solved!

[Carlspeak]

Here's another version by the great Rodrigues:

[Zilch]

The power of this model allows me to analyze and evaluate other people's efforts with an entirely different perspective.

AHHH, Vaporware!

[soundminded]

Fine. But your failure to put your work to practical use makes that patent essentially useless in the marketplace. A goal not realized is useless. At least outfits like Yamaha and Lexicon, among others, have implemented their research and turned out some products - pretty good ones, I might add.

PS: your comments notwithstanding, all approaches in the world of audio involve approximations and compromise.

Howard Ferstler

First of all, the mathematical approach I have taken is no more an approximation than Ampere's law or Gauss's law. Since you have never seen it even assuming you'd understand it, you have no way of knowing whether or not this statement is true. So far fewer than a dozen people have ever seen it. It is a generalized description of all acoustic phenomena. The patent I applied for is only one application of the discovery, there are others. One is a method of measurement. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately after all, the US patent office would not allow that idea to be applied for under the same patent application because it is considered a different art. My personal finances did not allow me to apply for a second patent at the time. I say it is fortunate because it gives great insight into the math. Due to a miscommunication, artifacts of that part of the application remained in the application as two sketches whose significance is incomprehensibly out of context with the rest of the application.

I approached 20 companies with my patent a year after it was issued and none of them were interested in it. According to my current patent attorney this is neither unusual nor surprising. Villchur himself was scoffed at with his invention of the Acoustic Suspension loudspeaker, manufacturers of the day said it wouldn't work. About 5 years after my patent was granted, I became aware of Yamaha DSP-1. Upon seeing it, I recognized it instantly having invented the pertinent algorithms it can perform myself, algorithms I contend Yamaha stole by the way its chip is configured and programmed. Upon advice of two different patent attorneys, I did not sue. DSP-1 incorporates within it, the simplest (crudest) form of a critical circuit that can perform a mathematical transform process required by this invention. Technically it exploited a loophole, a discrepency between the first part of the patent called the "Abstract" which is the initial brief description, and the part at the end called the "claims" which are the legal protections. However, according to the law, it was protected anyway because this would have been "obvious to anyone skilled in the art" which is the legal terminology used in patent law. The legal advice I got was not based on that but on the time and cost of a suit and the odds against winning.

From what I can tell from what I've seen of other devices from Yamaha and Lexicon I've had a chance to study based only on their installation manuals, they don't qualify or if they do, their circuit configurations are not in a usable form for my idea. Interestingly, DSP-1 and others have not found widespread acceptance among audiophiles and are not part of any but a tiny fracton of sound systems. (more about that further down) Initially DSP-1 had a list price of $900. When I saw it I bought one immediately for $750 but it sat unused for 15 years. Today you can buy them on ebay for under $100.

In principle, based on my mathematical model, if cost and practicality were not a consideration, the acoustics experienced in any seat in any concert hall could be duplicted by this method to whatever degree of accuracy was arbitrarily desired. In the real world with real equipment limitations, and practical considerations, there are so may compromises, approximations, assumptions, and factors such as variables of the listening room and recordings that it is surprisng to me that the idea can be made to work at all. The first prototype I built which was impossibly impractical to use took two years to make work. The second, the only other one I built which incorporates DSP-1 took five years to successfully tweak. Each recording requires a great deal of time and effort to adjust for. Any changes to the system and you can start all over again with all recordings you've found suitable settings for so far. There are many critical adjustments making it completely unsuitable for use even by advanced audiophiles in its current form. Yet even this primitive version works surprisingly well on most recordings...when it works at all. If a marketable product were ever to come of this, it would cost many tens of millions of dollars to develop, would require re-issue of all recordings and replacement of entire sound systems to be practical for use. Until a few years ago, I gave up all expectation that this would ever happen in my lifetime. However, this is not yet entirely out of the question, it's something I'm beginning to explore. One advantage it has is that it is can be made in a form that would make it imposible to pirate, both recordings and equipment. Another is that it is too complex for a DIY knockoff to be successfully marketed. It has to be custom designed, installed, and calibrated to function properly.

The theft of intellectual property is hardly unknown, it happens all the time. Sarnoff stole Farnsworth's invention of television. Watson and Crick stole and took credit for the Franklin's discovery of the structure of DNA. Armstrong's widow had to fight after his death for recognition of his invention of FM radio. And it isn't clear that Alexander Graham Bell actually invented the telephone, his version fatally flawed was only made to work by stealing another idea (saw a recent documentary about it.) The issue of how to exploit my idea without losing all of the potential profits from it is my current problem. Right now my patent attorney wants me to apply for more patents. I'm not so sure that's the best approach. I've been mulling that over for nearly a year.

[Zilch]

Right now my patent attorney wants me to apply for more patents. I'm not so sure that's the best approach. I've been mulling that over for nearly a year.

He finds the concepts embody sufficient merit as to warrant his doing this on spec, right?

I, too, have patents, a bunch of them. It's a pit of snakes. A patent is only as good as the financial resources available to back it up, in millions of dollars.

If the idea is worth a whit, an inventor's patent represents no significant impediment to others' willingness and ability to exploit it.

[soundminded]

He finds the concepts embody sufficient merit as to warrant his doing this on spec, right?

I, too, have patents, a bunch of them. It's a pit of snakes. A patent is only as good as the financial resources available to back it up, in millions of dollars.

If the idea is worth a whit, an inventor's patent represents no significant impediment to others' willingness and ability to exploit it.

Actually he said he's got backers that would put up at least $5 mil. First of all, that won't be spit compared to what it would take to develop it. Everything about trying to start up a manufacturing firm to build it is wrong. It's not the way I currently envision it. I think selling it as proprietary knowledge to someone very large already in this business who has the financial and technical resources resources to develop it and bring it to market is a much better idea. Since the current product paradigm has reached a technological dead end but technology in general has reached a point where developing this idea is now feasible, this might be the right time when opportunity presents itself. Ironically, this patent attorney has never had a demo of the prototype, he's only seen it and the theory on paper. He understands it, he's also a physicist. I make no secret of the risks in this idea. It's not clear to me at all that even with the best of technological resources it will enjoy success. It won't work in every instance being highly dependent on the room it is installed it. It likes symetrical usually rectangular rooms of about 150 square feet and up. I don't know the upper limit if there is one, the largest room I've tried it in was about 800 to 900 squre feet, roughly square. It does not like irregularly shaped rooms such as L shaped livingroom/dining rooms or rooms with large archways to adjacent rooms in it. I don't even want to think about how to deal with those problems. Its WAF is also probably about zero. You can't rearrange it to suit your idea of what is beautiful, you can't hide it. Successful installation presents entirely different and in some ways much tougher technical challenges compared to the current technology. As I said, in the real world I was surprised it can be made to work at all.

[Zilch]

There are ways:

http://65.106.104.130:8090/JBL/Performance...licy%20FY04.pdf