Apart from being an accomplished pianist, Richard Black is an experienced recording engineer, producer and editor, and consultant on audio technology.
With the ear of a musician and the mind of an engineer, he has the ability to discern the difference between excellent and just good audio and put his finger on exactly what a problem may be with sound reproduction and how to solve it.
In this PDF document Richard examines the
Richard started playing the piano just before his 7th birthday and was lucky to go to a school with a good music department. One of his school-friends founded a record label and through him, he met Ronald Stevenson a musical visionary, who was a close friend until his death a few years ago.
After school, Richard studied physics for his degree and worked for eight years in industrial electronics, but never gave up practising the piano and doing various accompanying work.
He has met and worked with many famous musicians and recalls meeting John Ogdon through a shared record label and watching him play and turning the pages for him on many occasions. Richard says that Ogden was an object lesson in achieving the apparently impossible, while Sir Donald Macintyre made him think a lot about effective sound production.
Richard says The Wigmore Hall is one of his favourite venues to play and listen to music, often listening to friends performing there. While he’s not sure it’s the ultimate acoustic for piano, it’s as good as it gets for string quartet, which is a favourite genre of his, and voices bloom there too. Once again understanding the acoustics of the Hall allows him to critique the reproduction of records, CD’s, and the equipment they are played through.
8 ohm
configured so that the characteristic impedance of the cable approximately matches the impedance of the speaker above 5kHz. For a typical speaker, the range is from 8 ohms to 20 ohms in the critical area for frequencies above 5kHz.