 Canada's World-Class
Speaker Lab
Canadian audio brands consistently make a splash in
international markets these days, particularly with speakers; audiophiles have come to
realize the superb quality of names such as Energy and PSB, Paradigm, Axiom, Mirage and
many others. Canadian speakers now routinely receive glowing reviews from the world's
audio press.
Without taking anything away from those companies'
excellent designers, to a very large extent the success of Canada's speaker companies can
be traced to a unique technical facility: the National Research Council in Ottawa. This
federal agency was designed to provide research and technical support to Canadian
industry, and it has done so in spades, at least as far as audio is concerned.
The NRC audio testing program wasn't even a gleam in
anybody's eye when a young PhD named Floyd Toole arrived in 1965, fresh from his
postgraduate work at Imperial College in London. A native of Moncton, New Brunswick, Toole
studied in England on scholarship, and did his doctoral work in sound localization -- an
important part of stereo perception -- and wished to continue his research in that field
at NRC.
What he needed for his investigations were speakers of a
certain quality level, and he began to borrow various hi-fi models from local dealers to
determine which ones might be appropriate. Basically this meant starting from scratch, as
there were few accepted techniques and standards for evaluating speakers at that time. But
NRC was blessed with just the sort of equipment needed -- primarily one of the few
anechoic chambers in the country -- and with an audiophile-cum-scientist willing to put in
the hours to develop a program of speaker testing.
For some years this had little impact outside the walls of
NRC, although Toole was building up a body of experience and hard data that would stand
him in good stead later on. Then, in 1969, he got a call from a magazine editor named
Ernie Welling in Montreal.
The mainstream hi-fi magazines in other countries were
popular in large part because they ran equipment reviews based on actual testing, rather
than informal hands-on impressions. Welling was looking for a facility in Canada that
might be able to perform even some rudimentary tests, to be published in a magazine that
would eventually be called AudioScene Canada.
He turned to one of his (non-audio) contributors, who
happened to work at NRC, to see whether that body might have the appropriate resources. It
did. Toole could design and implement a proper speaker testing program, and Welling could
keep NRC supplied with speakers so Toole could continue his research. In 1971, the
magazine's first speaker review appeared.
As time went by, both the formal measurements and the
listening tests were fine-tuned to enhance their correspondence with one another.
Eventually, experienced listeners could predict fairly closely what a speaker would sound
like just by looking at the curves, and the veterans of the listening tests took to
drawing little response curves on their questionnaires as they listened. These proved to
be remarkably accurate, and are now a formal part of the listening sessions.
Magazine work did propel the NRC audio program to a
considerable extent, but the main reason for the Council's existence was to assist the
manufacturing sector. For almost a decade after Toole began measuring speakers, the
Canadian industry ignored the opportunity.
PSB's Paul Barton in the NRC chamber.
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A breakthrough of sorts came in 1974 when a
small audio company from St. Jacobs, Ontario sent a pair of speakers to one of the editors
of AudioScene. Paul Barton was not looking for a review of his product but rather
an opinion as to its quality. As it happened, Floyd Toole happened to be in the magazine's
offices when the speaker was set up, and he suggested that Barton bring his speakers to
Ottawa for some formal tests.
"It was a real revelation," says Barton. "I
had only a crude notion of what I was doing, and had no way at all of measuring what I had
built." Toole took a real interest in Barton's work, and the revamped speaker --
dubbed the PSB Avante II -- was considered at the time as the first Canadian speaker that
ranked with all the imports; some thought it outshone most of them.
But Barton recalls Toole's frustration in not attracting
other manufacturers. Eventually, however, the majority of Canadian speaker companies began
making the trek to Ottawa to learn from Toole and use the NRC facilities to develop their
speakers.
As the Canadian speaker industry took advantage of NRC more
and more, Toole and his colleagues began to put the Council on the map internationally.
The NRC speaker listening room, for instance, became the standard for IEC (the
International Electrotechnical Commission) with clones around the world, and numerous
scientific papers on speaker performance and evaluation emanated from the halls of the
National Research Council.
In 1991, Floyd Toole left NRC to become vice president of
engineering for Harman International in California, parent of JBL, Harman-Kardon,
Infinity, and a variety of other audio brands. Even without Toole's presence, however, the
speaker development work went on at NRC. Paul Barton points out that Toole's contributions
in setting up the speaker testing program, and his own scientific research, were immensely
valuable, but that his work in that area was approaching the point of diminishing returns.
"After the initial learning experience, I have mostly
worked on my own at NRC," Barton points out. "That's true of most of the other
companies as well, and some of them have even set up their own test facilities so they
won't have to go to Ottawa as often."
The magazine testing program continued as well. AudioScene
had ceased publishing in 1982, but by that time NRC-based reports had become a staple of Sound
& Vision magazine, and remained so until it, too, ceased publication in 1996. That
last issue contained what might have been the last speaker review based on NRC data -- it
certainly felt that way as I wrote it.
But a facility that valuable probably couldn't go entirely
unused. Certainly manufacturers do use it still, if less often, and the lab is once again
being used for equipment reviews in consumer media.
Look around. SoundStage! has picked up the torch and
NRC speaker reviews are available again.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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