Memorial Tributes Volume 22 (2019) / Chapter Skim
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LEO L. BERANEK
LEO L. BERANEK
Pages 19-30
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From page 20... ...
MELLOW SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY LEO LEROY BERANEK, a renowned acoustician, teacher, philanthropist, leading light of hi-fi sound, and cofounder of the internet-pioneering company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) , died October 10, 2016, at the age of 102.
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From page 21... ...
To help Hunt develop a means for playing the newly developed 12-inch vinyl records, which needed a much lowerweight pickup, Leo was tasked with setting up a listening studio and designing the playback equipment. This included a 20 watt tube amplifier and a multicell horn loudspeaker with a large exponential horn woofer to showcase the improved sound quality of vinyl compared to 78 rpm shellac disks.
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From page 22... ...
He was soon recruited to lead a team in a National Defense Research Committee project, with Morse and Hunt as chair and vice chair, respectively, of the supervisory committee. The Army Air Corps urgently needed a lightweight acoustical material to deaden propeller noise in their bombers, which they believed was causing pilots to become overfatigued.
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From page 23... ...
The speakers would be too loud for testing outdoors in inhabited areas, but they needed to be tested in soundproof conditions without reflection, simulating outdoor conditions. Leo designed one of the first chambers to provide such conditions, using thousands of glass fiber wedges on the walls, and described it as so quiet that "you could hear the blood rushing through your ears." He even coined the term "anechoic chamber," which has entered the dictionary.
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From page 24... ...
In 1948 Leo, together with his fellow MIT professor, Richard Bolt, founded Bolt Beranek, which became BBN in 1950 when they were joined by Richard's former student Robert Newman. Their first contract was to provide acoustical consultancy for the United Nations Assembly Hall in New York.
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From page 25... ...
After being asked to provide acoustical consultancy for the David Geffen Hall (then known as Philharmonic Hall) at New York's Lincoln Center, BBN surveyed 54 concert halls and opera houses, mainly in Europe, to establish the relationship between the acoustical properties and the size and design of the auditorium.
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From page 26... ...
Aware of a lawsuit at Newark Liberty International Airport brought by angry residents, the Port of New York Authority wanted to avoid a repeat at Idlewild. Using psychoacoustic research, BBN came up with a new metric to measure noise, the perceived-noise decibel (PNdB)
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From page 27... ...
Yet the internet has had a far greater impact on the world today than either human space travel or supersonic passenger flight. On October 3, the first message sent from the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International)
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From page 28... ...
Leo incorporated a horn comprising two curved surfaces, one above and the other below the proscenium, to amplify the soloists' voices so that they wouldn't be drowned out by the orchestra in the pit below as in most other opera houses. The venue receives glowing testimonies from leading musicians who perform there.
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From page 29... ...
Beranek of Cedar Rapids and Thomas B Haynes of Chicago, and granddaughter Antonia Hsu Haynes.
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