The Keele Tone-Burst Test
The Chicago, IL Sound Reinforcement for Technicians seminar has come and gone. One of the highlights was an evening presentation by DB Keele, Jr. Many of you know Don from his work at Electro-voice and Harman, and for his patents on Constant Directivity (CD) horns and Constant Beamwidth Transducer (CBT) arrays. One of his numerous other accomplishments is the development of a test for the short-term power handling of loudspeakers. This was the subject of his evening presentation.
The “boink” test uses a 6.5 cycle wavelet to pulse a loudspeaker. It is performed at 1/3-octave intervals. The stimulus itself is 1/3-oct in bandwidth due to its length. There is an article with more detail in the SynAudCon Member Library. The WAV files were included on the SynAudCon Test CD for Sound Reinforcement Systems. It is long out of production, but you can download the files below. The files are stereo, with the bursts repeating at 1-second intervals in the left track and 2-second intervals in the right track.
Just download (2 MB) and unzip to a directory of your choice. pb
DB Keele, Jr. tests my “snowman” demo 3-way loudspeaker.