About the authors
Philip Newell began working professionally with loudspeakers in 1966, in the maintenance department of a shop selling high fidelity sound reproduction equipment in the town of his birth, Blackburn, England. Within a year he had begun to work for the Mecca chain of dance halls as a live-sound engineer. By 1970 he was working at a recording studio in south London, where he designed his first studio monitoring system. Philip moved to Pye Records in late 1970, when Pye was one of the UK's premier record companies with a large recording complex near Marble Arch, in central London. He worked primarily as a studio maintenance engineer, but was also involved in many recordings, and then moved to a fledgling Virgin Records organisation in late 1971 as chief recording engineer. In 1973 Philip co-founded The Manor Mobile with partners Richard Branson and Nik Powell, putting on the road what was probably at the time the world's most advanced mobile recording studio. From 1974 to 1982 he was technical director of the whole recording divisions of Virgin, but remained working as a recording engineer and record producer during the entire period, feeling that it was better to keep in practice than to concentrate solely on administration if the most balanced decisions were to be made.
After selling his shares in Virgin in 1982, to concentrate on flying sea-planes, a chance meeting in London in 1983 with Alex Weeks, the then owner of Reflexion Arts, led them to deciding to start an acoustics and monitoring branch of the company, for which Philip designed a series of studio monitor loudspeakers during a period of building many recording studios. It was during this time that he met Keith Holland at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), a department of Southampton University, in the UK. Together they worked on the design of improved mid-range horn loudspeakers for studio monitoring systems. Although Philip left Reflexion Arts in 1988 to pursue a free-lance career, his collaboration with them and Keith Holland and the ISVR has lasted the twenty years to the publication of this book.
Philip Newell's 40 year career with loudspeakers has encompassed their use in domestic hi-fi, live sound, musical instrument amplification, music recording and mixing, film studios, television studios, video post-production rooms and many other uses. He has worked with them as a live sound engineer, recording and mixing engineer and record producer. The majority of his work since leaving Virgin has been as a designer of music recording studios, cinema mixing theatres and live performance spaces, and he is still involved in the design and development of high performance loudspeaker systems.
Philip is a Fellow if the Institute of Acoustics, a Member of the Audio Engineering Society, a member of the Seaplane Pilot's Association and British Mensa. He has written five books on acoustics and electro-acoustics, and has published over 100 related articles, journal papers and conference papers. Since 1992 he has lived in Spain, and during the course of his work, he has travelled to over 30 countries. His recording career was very musically varied, from the Duke Ellington Orchestra to Queen; from The Who to The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra; from Mike Oldfield to John Cale; to English brass bands and Welsh choirs.
Dr Keith Holland is currently a Lecturer at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), University of Southampton, UK, where he has been in full-time employment since 1993, and from where he obtaining a BSc in Engineering Acoustics and Vibration in 1987, and a PhD on horn loudspeakers in 1993. Since 1990, Keith has taught Electroacoustics and Audio Systems to under- and post-graduate students at the ISVR, and for ten of those years, also to the Tonmeister students at the University of Surrey.
As a researcher and academic at the ISVR, Keith has been involved in a large number of acoustic research projects on a wide variety of topics, which include: acoustic source location, advanced measurement techniques, aircraft cabin noise, cathedral acoustics, crossovers, drive-unit characterisation, duct acoustics, engine exhaust noise, fluid dynamics, guitar amplifiers, horn loudspeakers, inverse methods, jet noise, loudspeaker arrays, loudspeaker cables, loudspeaker directivity, microphone array processing, musical acoustics, nonlinear acoustics, numerical acoustic modelling, psychoacoustics, recording studio acoustics, room acoustic measurement, sound absorption, spacial imaging, tyre noise, vibration transducer development, vibroacoustic reciprocity and virtual audio. He is the author/co-author of over 60 papers, of which more than 30 are audio-related, and was the author of a series of 36 monthly objective monitor loudspeaker reviews published in Studio Sound magazine.
A healthy interest in all things audio, and loudspeakers in particular, was inherited from his father, Peter Holland, who, throughout the 1950s, 60s and beyond, spent many hours tinkering and experimenting with valves, transistors, tape recorders, loudspeakers and a lot of wire - with sometimes remarkable results! Keith followed suit, and built his first complete audio system in about 1967, using a Garrard turntable, home-made amplifiers (3 watts per channel) and speakers based around 9 inch × 5 inch elliptical drivers which came out of an old radiogram. By the early 1970s, this system had evolved into a room-dominating monster, including a 9 cubic foot sand-filled corner cabinet from a book by Gilbert Briggs (the founder of Wharfedale). While experimenting with crossovers for the giant woofer, it became very obvious that the more components that were used in the crossover, the worse the bass sounded. Using a 10-channel graphic equaliser, with the 30 and 60 Hz sliders fully up and the rest down on the left channel, and the opposite on the right, a makeshift mono active system was created. The benefits of active crossovers were immediately heard as the sound quality of this system was vastly superior to that from any attempt to use passive crossovers.
A few years later, a chance meeting with Ian Piper of ICP Electronics resulted in a collaboration on the design and construction of an actively-driven PA loudspeaker system which, to the amazement of many clients, delivered a sound quality and level far beyond what was expected using such apparently modest components. This system evolved over a period of about 10 years, during which time Ian taught Keith a great deal about the skills of live sound mixing, and between them they set up and mixed hundreds of live acts, some very good, some awful, and some were even quite famous!
By 1984, Keith had spent six years working in the manufacturing industry since being awarded a HND in Mechanical Engineering at (the then) Bournemouth College of Technology in 1978. He had become a skilled machinist, but his strong interest and curiosity about all things acoustic drew him to leave a well-paid job and go back to school at the ISVR to learn more. Three years later he was awarded a BSc in Engineering Acoustics and Vibration and received the prize for academic performance in his final year. It was during this year that Keith first met Philip Newell.
Keith had mentioned to his academic supervisor, Professor Frank Fahy, that he was interested in horn loudspeakers, and, quite by chance, Philip Newell was developing monitor loudspeaker systems and had been making enquiries at Southampton University to find out if anyone was doing research into horns. Philip was put in touch with Frank, and within a very short time Keith was beginning a three-year doctoral research project on horn loudspeakers, sponsored by Philip. A key result of the research is the AX2 horn used in the current Reflexion Arts monitor loudspeakers. To date, the work has produced, or inspired a total of 26 papers jointly authored by Philip Newell and Keith Holland, and, as this book proves, their collaboration is still as strong as ever.
Keith is a Member of the Institute of Acoustics and is a regular contributor to the Institute's Reproduced Sound series of conferences. He is also a member of the Audio Engineering Society. He continues to maintain and build on his interest in loudspeakers through many teaching, research, consultancy and hobby activities.
Keith is married to Sharon, whom he met in 1984. They live in their native southern England, and together they have two children, Bethany and Thomas. As a family, they enjoy camping, boating, walking and, of course, listening to music.
Sergio Castro, who orchestrated all the figures for this book, was born in 1955, in Oporto, Portugal and soon found his great interest in music. At the age of 12 he bought his first acoustic guitar and a few months later, with a turntable ceramic cartridge, he added electric amplification to the instrument through an old Telefunken radio set.
When he was 13, he was playing drums professionally with a local rock band and from then on, and simultaneously with his high school and his university studies later, he has been a full time professional musician, playing bass and guitar with some of the most relevant bands both in Portugal and in Spain until the early 90s.
During 1983 he built and operated the first multitrack recording studio in Oporto, and in 1985 he initiated the Planta Sonica Studios project, later to be designed and built by Philip Newell. During the following years, in this studio, he recorded and/or produced most of the Pop, Folk and Rock acts in the region (Galicia).
His interest in loudspeakers goes back to the time he had to choose his bass and guitar amplification, when he started experimenting with different driver types in order to tailor the timbre of the instruments he played. Modifying some of the off-the-shelf available amplifiers, and experimenting with bigger speaker boxes in order to achieve extended bass, he attempted to understand more about loudspeaker behaviour, aiming to improve his live gear without huge money investment.
In the late 70s he contributed to the PA loudspeaker designs at SEC, one of the pioneering pro-audio systems manufacturers in Portugal.
His involvement in the studio business, both as a producer and as a recording engineer, led him to investigate further the concept of studio monitors, trying to understand the audible differences he could then find when travelling among different studios and different listening environments.
Since then, his interest in the matter has grown and he became an Associate Member of the Institute of Acoustics in the UK and a member of the AES (currently a Member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish section). He studied acoustics at Vigo University, Spain, where he took a degree in Applied Acoustics.
Today he shares his time between being the head designer and co-owner of Artesania de BluesBox, the manufacturer of the recently introduced and successful brand of guitar, bass and installation PA speakers cabinets, as well as being the managing director of Reflexion Arts. Reflexion Arts is a company dedicated to the acoustic design and installation of music-related spaces, who also manufacture one of the highest definition range of studio monitor loudspeakers. Apart from that he keeps playing guitar live and in the studio through excellent amplifiers and loudspeakers.