In 1986, Pierre Sprey stood in a Maryland recording studio and listened to sound through two microphones. The first was the pride and joy of the company which created it: every quantitative assessment of its performance produced excellent results. The second microphone was the same model, but at Sprey’s request the company removed all the components designed to “correct” the sound. They did this somewhat reluctantly and the company founder apologized upfront for the appalling performance that the microphone was likely to produce. But Sprey was surprised to discover that the microphone without the corrective components was the one that produced a more pleasant sound, a deeper and richer reproduction of live music.
”At that moment it occurred to me that perhaps the music industry was misguided; like a hiker with a compass giving the wrong readings, it was heading with alacrity in the wrong direction,” says Mapleshade founder Sprey, “The more the music industry developed, the further it went from the music that sounded pleasant to the human ear.”
Sprey places the blame on a eighteenth century researcher named Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, who claimed that any musical sound could be represented through a mathematical equation using sine waves. But Fourier set down minimum conditions for using his equations and according to Sprey, the music met none of them. “Fourier said, for example, that his equations could be used the musical frequency ranged from an infinite minus to an infinite plus. Who has ever heard of a such a frequency?” According to him, the use of these equations misled the music industry in two ways. Firstly, they designed their products to deliver good mathematical results, but failed to notice the fact that these do not necessarily create the best quality sound. Second, they used these equations to convert analog recordings to digital and in doing so they made the music a little more lifeless and dull.
”I was able, by a process of trial and error, to create recordings that sound infinitely better than those made on the basis of mathematical assumptions,” says Sprey. “The entertainment electronics market will be worth $145 billion by 2009,” he predicts confidently, “It’s no wonder that companies in the field are content with what they’re doing and don’t want to change anything. I believe that Israel is the place where I will be able to find open minded entrepreneurs with whom I can work to set up a music industry that operates on entirely different principles.”
Highly universal results
Mapleshade is a conspicuous player in the US music industry. It produces a range of audio products and its headquarters also serve as a recording studio, primarily for jazz musicians. Last year, the company opened a marketing agency in Israel. Sprey has come to Israel to search for start-ups that would be interested in cooperating in the development of products based on his concepts. He has so far met with several young companies active in this field, among them NeoCrafts, Pulsicom Technologies and Hingi Ltd. He also met with several venture capital firms and with chief scientist Eli Opper, who promised to look into the possibility of supporting such joint ventures, should they be set up.
Israel does not have an advanced sound industry, but we have a strong presence in signal and voice processing as well as video imaging representation and analysis. Sprey feels the mistakes made in the music industry apply to video technology too.
Globes: So the error lies in the understanding of activity in the brain rather than of the ear.
Sprey:”Exactly. Since 1986, when we presented our preliminary findings, many doctoral theses have been conducted in fields related to mathematics and brain research, with a view to gaining an understanding why the theory cannot be reconciled with the findings.”
Do you believe that your findings can be represented mathematically? Or to put it another way, can you create the compass that will point in the right direction?
”Absolutely. That’s how it works in science; you start off with a theory, then suddenly you come up against findings that refute it; so you build a new theory.”
If measurement is, in fact, entirely subjective, you could well discover that we need different stereo sets for different people. Is it possible that you might discover that women need a different type of cable from the one that men need, because of a different brain structure?
”Measurement is indeed subjective, but we found that the results are very much universal in nature. We conduct tests on dozens of audiophiles, and create a product only if 99% of them agree there’s an improvement.”
Similarities with the F16
You were one of the three team leaders that worked on the development of the F16. Is there a connection between the two fields?
”In some ways, it’s exactly the same story. When John Boyd, Harry Hillaker and I came to the US Department of Defense in 1960 to lead the development of the F16, we were there as outsiders. We aimed to design an aircraft that was better but also smaller and cheaper, and that didn’t go down well with the people who manufactured, marketed or flew the bigger and more expensive F15. They called us “The Mafia” because we got budgets and components through a variety of roundabout methods and posed a challenge to the establishment.
”The F16’s success was due, I think, to two factors. First of all, we never deviated from our goal. We wanted to design a plane that could maneuver better in combat, and we weren’t interested in anything else. Today, manufacturers are designing and building aircraft for five different missions. That, I feel, is a recipe for poor quality aircraft - you should set yourself a primary goal and then stick to it. Secondly, we did not have any assumptions about what would be a good aircraft. We checked every assumption against information in the field. This is not the sort of information that is readily accessible amidst the fog of combat, but we persisted and we got it. I applied the same two principles, focusing on the goal and action on the basis of information from the field, when it came to music.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on March 14, 2006
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2006