About Floyd Toole

Neil had just emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto. As part of fitting in to the audio community there, he embraced all things Canadian (except for maintaining an allegiance to upstate New York’s Genesee Cream Ale). This included, of course, the Canadian loudspeaker industry, and with good reason. At the time, the National Research Council of Canada, in an effort to stimulate the Canadian loudspeaker industry, had developed a loudspeaker test and measurement section at their facilities in Ottawa, under the direction of researcher Floyd Toole. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Toole undertook to develop more robust criteria for evaluating the performance of loudspeakers. Toward that end, he developed panels of trained listeners to evaluate a wide range of loudspeakers, and attempted to correlate the findings of these listeners with physical behaviors of the loudspeakers under test. This resulted in a series of landmark papers (check the AES Journal and also preprints from http://www.aes.org/publications/preprints/search.cfm) pertaining to the subjective measurement of loudspeakers.

So, Neil told me to check out Floyd’s work. He also advised me (knowing of my beginning efforts with wide-dispersion loudspeakers) that Floyd was offering the facilities at NRC for dirt cheap, if and when I needed some serious testing work done.

Well, I read the papers, and even used them in my classes. I also got to know Floyd a little at AES conventions, through the good offices of Neil. I began to hang out with some of the Canadians (Fredonia is just across Lake Erie from Ontario, after all, and on a clear day . . . ) and even took my students to Toronto AES section meetings occasionally. After I moved to Boston and began my years of servitude at Berklee, we even hosted Floyd for some AES section meetings and I got to hang out with him some more, on a more personable and single-malt scotch basis.

Then, in 1991, my partners and I built some loudspeaker prototypes to test, prototypes that we thought were ready for prime time. So, I called Floyd, we booked NRC and we then took a lovely-looking pair of loudspeakers up to Ottawa, where we spent two days measuring them in the NRC’s anechoic chamber and listening to the them in double blind tests in the NRC’s listening room, comparing our babies to a range of commercially available consumer speakers offered at a variety of different price points.

And so began my adult education regarding subjective measurement.