hi-fi integrated amplifier
Rotterdam, 1973: the 44th Audio Engineering Society Convention. Svein Erik Borja, a Norwegian broadcaster and record producer, is watching a Finnish researcher from Philips in Eindhoven, Matti Otala, presenting a paper entitled ‘An audio power amplifier for ultimate requirements’.
This was a rather more exuberant title than Otala's presentation made three years earlier – “Transient distortion in transistorized audio amplifiers” – but the focus was the same. Otala had described a distortion that he termed Transient Intermodulation (TIM), now more commonly termed Transient Intermodulation Distortion (TID). This was, he claimed, the reason that amplifiers didn't sound as good as their THD might claim. In the time between the two papers, Otala had set out to prove his theory practically, so that the 1973 convention featured an audio demonstra-tion using
