Hi folks, I'm Serge Smirnoff - a music lover, independent audio researcher and founder of SoundExpert.org.
Sound quality is my main scientific interest. I'm working on the new audio metric which allows using of real-life music material for audio measurements in addition to sinusoidal or other technical signals. Such music based measurements more fully characterize performance of audio equipment, reveal more drawbacks and better correspond to human perception of sound quality. Inefficiency of traditional audio metric (THD, IMD, S/N, ...) and its complete uselessness in case of digital equipment often results in marketing of lower quality audio devices as higher quality ones. Consumer equipment is prone to such cheating in particular (see the recent example).
To the moment the innovative audio metric has already been beta-tested on 30+ portable players and smartphones. Resulting measurements are quite revealing; they can be used to compare sound quality of the devices even by non-prepared people. The corresponding measurement procedure is mature enough to be extended to almost all audio equipment both digital and analog. Such measurements of audio gear will be posted in this blog.
More than fifteen years I perform audio research in my spare time and accumulate results on SoundExpert site. To be honest, I wouldn't do anything else if I could. I feel this is my area of competence, the "sweet spot". Unfortunately, my skills as entrepreneur are very very basic and all my attempts to monetize results of this research failed so far. Lack of time (and absence of appropriate laboratory equipment) turns the research into a long-standing process. Fortunately, emerging of the new crypto-economy gives the people like me a new chance. For sure I will give it a try and Steemit looks like the right place to start with.
Illustration by Becca Clark