Preface
I was building a studio, some years ago, in the Basque region of Spain, close to Bilbao. We were using local labour, but I used a Portuguese foreman who had previously worked with me on other constructions in order to provide some experienced guidance on the specialised day-to-day work. He understood Castilian Spanish quite well, but many of the people working on the construction were speaking Euskera, the Basque national language. After a few days, the foreman said to me, “This language is very similar to Arabic” (In fact, apart from ‘Coca Cola’ and ‘Windows’ there are probably no other words or structures in common), I asked how he came to this conclusion, and he replied, “A few years ago I was working in Morocco, where they speak Arabic, and I couldn't understand anything. Well, I can't understand anything when they speak Basque either, so the two languages must be very similar”.
It must have taken a full week for my brain to recover from the intellectual offence which it had suffered, and yet, at times, within the recording industry I am assaulted by opinions and reasoning about loudspeakers which bear little more logic than the aforementioned foreman's linguistic conclusions. In an attempt to throw some more light on these matters, Dr Keith Holland and I therefore decided that we should write a book on the subject of the fundamental differences between the Basque and Arabic languages. However, once we realised that we knew no more than half a dozen words between us (‘Coca Cola’ and ‘Windows’ included) we resolved to write a book on loudspeakers, instead.