ecently, I found myself in an email conversation with two colleagues on the nature of reproduced audio. How should we think about it? The conversation was provoked by a “hybrid” (live and online) presentation of the Pacific Northwest section of the Audio Engineering Society called “What Does ‘Accurate’ Even Mean?” The presenter was James D. “JJ” Johnston, a distinguished researcher in the field of perceptual audio coding and a co-inventor of MP3. Among many other honors, Johnston was selected to present the Richard Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 2012 AES convention—an honor shared by our own John Atkinson, who had given that lecture
