Avare wrote:It is a great text. The point is what is the focus of the list? I view the list as a short what you need to be competent designing your studio
Trying to summarize, he is great but not for that group.
Agreed. The others are more up to date as well, and in many cases cover things better than he did. I must admit, I was rather disappointed with Newell's book when I read it. I got the impression that a lot of it was along the lines of "look what a hugely complex but very wonderful job I did here isolating this place, me, personally, myself, so complicated...", with some rather convoluted constructions in some places, that sometimes don't make so much sense. I mean, undoubtedly they do work, and he was one of the pioneers in many ways, but in many of the builds he discusses, it seems to me that the same results could have been obtained in other, less complex ways. Maybe I'm being a bit unfair, since he certainly deserves great respect for all that he has done, and there certainly is a lot of good, valuable information in there... I guess I was just a bit underwhelmed with the focus on complexity when it didn't seem to be necessary, and the focus on WHAT was done, rather then WHY it was done: the lack of explaining the theory behind it.
I'm a "nuts and bolts" kind of guy, and I like to understand the underlying concepts, seeing the math, the research, investigation, theory, and testing to support the physical implementation. I want to know
HOW it works, not just
THAT it works. He doesn't always go into that very much, and you just sort of have to take his word that "this thing works like this, where layer A does X, and layers B and C do Y, then layer S, M, P and R also do some X, but mostly Z", ... without any details of HOW it is that X is achieved with A. My view is that decades ago, when the science of acoustics wasn't as advanced as it is today, he just "did stuff" that turned out to work from his own experience, but which could be done in other ways today, based on the better understand that we have of acoustics. From that point of view, a lot of his book is useful historical reference of "how we used to do things". The rest is great, of course, and he does have a lot of up-to-date material in there, along with the theory and math.
But overall, I came away unimpressed with it being a book that is highly applicable to home studio builds today. I would not recommend it.
Sorry to be "that guy" here, sort of dissing a respected author, but it's not my favorite book on the subject.
- Stuart -
So true! Their old stuff was great but they don't seem to be doing much acoustic research these days. Or rather, a lot less than before. Pity.