Jargon and lingo glossary - A & B.
Aanvil
A tiny bone inside your ear that is so named due to it's slight visual similarity to an anvil, it is connected to a tissue that acts as a transducer converting the vibrational information into neural signals, which are then fed into your brain. The anvil is normally excited by the eardrum, in other words this bone is what allows you to hear sounds. However the aanvil is the evolutionary remains of a larger bone that formed a part of the jaw, for that reason there is still a connection between your cheekbones and the aanvil which is the reason you can hear yourself eating etc., the "bone phone" and similar loudspeaker less headphone units commonly referred to as "bone conducting headphones" take advantage of this anomaly to excite the aanvil by placing a transducer on your cheekbones rather than your years, while those devices never sound as good as normal headphones they do have a couple of advantages, namely that it is impossible to harm the eardrum by using them and you can still hear with your ears while using them.
Accumulator
Archane name for a rechargeable battery.
Active See --> Amplifier
AlNiCo = Aluminium, Nickel & Cobalt Magnets
An Hard Magnet alloy with a unusually dense magnetic field especially if cast rather than sintered, is extremely temperature stable for a magnet, mechanically strong and extremely corrosion resistant in other words an ideal magnet for any sort of transducer manufacture. Originally invented in 1931 and in addition to the metals that make up the name there is invariably a tiny bit of copper in there as well, given an almost mythical status by some audiophiles but expensive compared to Neodymium and other similar magnets, slightly more difficult to work with than the more common magnetic materials and easily demagnetised so mostly used in high end products. Never use a standard cartridge demagnetiser on a pickup made using an Alnico magnet! Something like the Gryphon demagnetiser should be OK though.
Amplifier
A circuit or a device that increases the power of a signal. Preamplifier : A small signal amplifier that brings a signal or signals up to a common standard which is then further amplified, by far the most common version of this is the control amplifier but in modern usage the 2 are usually synonymous, but lots of specialised pre-amplification devices exist, a Head Amplifier and Phono Preamps are a good examples of this. Control amplifier : A device that acts as the control unit for an audio system, compromising of a number of pre-amplification circuits that interface units with specific output characteristics to a common standard and also allows the users to control which signal is sent to the amplifier and at what strength (i.e. volume). A control amplifier often also allows the user to perform householding tasks such as equalisation or other filtering, re-routing signals to a recording device and so on. In modern times all incoming and outgoing signals are line level which has given birth to a variant of the control amplifier called a line stage in which the device only features an input selector switch and a preamplifier section with volume control. Power amplifier : An amplifier that amplifies a signal to a degree that it can be used to drive a loudspeaker with, a power amplifier is almost invariably has a set amount of amplification so the loudness is controlled by the incoming signal which is typically a control amplifier or a similar preamp such as a mixer. Integrated amplifier : 1) A device that combines the functions of a control and power amplifier into a single unit. 2) A power amplifier built into a device that typically does not feature it such as a mixer or a loudspeaker, that case the device is often referred to as "Active" Passive pre/control amplifier/line stage Not an amplifier at all but a passive functional replacement for a control amplifier, basically you get a number of switches that allow you to choose between inputs and an attenuator, usually a variable resistor, a bank of switched resistors or a transformer, that allows you to control the strength of the signal that is delivered to the power amplifier and thus the volume coming out of the speakers. This sort of a design takes advantage of the fact that almost all modern audio and AV devices feature line level outputs and thus do not need amplification or equalisation prior to being sent to a power amp. There also exist minimal devises that have just an attenuator and no switching capabilities, these are useful only for systems with only one source component.
Archaeoacoustics
Basically the idea that you can retrieve sounds or other vibrational information from materials that predate the invention of audio recording, a pipe dream with a somewhat limited foundation in science (i.e. it's possible but the retrieved information is so small as to be useless), but still holds a fascination for a number of people.
Architectural
An American idiom which is used for audio and video products that are built into "the architecture", i.e. in the walls, floors or ceilings of a house in order to make them invisible or at the least less obtrusive, but in some quarters the usage of the term has expanded to mean any Brown Goods that are hidden from view.
ATRAC = Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding
Sony's property perpetual coding & compression system that is used on their Mini Disc and some of their solid state based music players. Works on similar princips to MPEG compression as used in MP3's (see PASC), basically an audio signal is split into 52 bands exponentially (i.e. the higher the frequency the wider the bands), all data that is duplicated inside each band is then removed, all data that the processor thinks the user will not hear due to the masking effect of the ears and all data it thinks is superficial (i.e. silence) is also removed and so on until the data has reached a reduction of 4,83:1 (or 292 kbs for a 16b 44KHz signal). Initial versions of the ATRAC codec were absolutely horrendous, the quality of recordings made by early MiniDisc recorders were much worse than could be archived with a reasonable hi-fi cassette recorder, but improvements in the technology meant that by 1997 (ATRAC v4) or so the technology was becoming much more useful and today's models are quite good. Like all perpetual coding schemes ATRAC has problems with harmonically rich music, quick variations in dynamics and harmonics and the masking/compression artefacts can be irritating to some listeners (since the masking effect varies from person to person). It's not only the version of the codec (currently v6) that matters but also the power of the DSP that performs the work, the more expensive models of MD recorders often have more powerful processing chips and/or use more than one chip for the encoding process.
Autoblend See --> High Blend
Bakelite = Phenol formaldehyde
Or rather compounds that use phenol as a sole or main binding agent, filler is usually wood pulp of some sort but can be a wide variety of organic or mineral materials. Bakelite was originally a trade name in the 19th century for a specific phenol based compound but became a generic term later on for any phenol based compounds except in Germany where Bakelite remained a specific term and Kunstharz the generic. Popular for a time as a binding agent used in 78 Rpm. records were it was used not as a primary binder but to reduce the need for Shellac which is a natural substance and had a tendency to vary somewhat in price and availability with market fluctuations. Became very popular in the early 1920's in the Brown Goods business since it could easily be mass manufactured in any shape or form via the use of moulds and heat curing, while being sufficiently strong to be used in these applications (browngoods are typically not handled much), is cheaper than woods or metals that need to be machined and can be dyed which is cheaper than painting the bloody thing, as such it is a predecessor to plastic as far as usage is concerned. Can get a bit brittle with age especially if it experiences direct sunlight during it's lifetime and while hard, it is not as strong as modern plastics but is chemically stable so the expected lifetime of Bakelite housings is typically longer than that of many of the materials that replaced it, and although it can react with some filler materials, that eventuality is very rare. In other words there is no need to treat them in order to prolong it's life, Bakelite can absorb moisture if it experiences prolonged immersion in it but drying it thoroughly will cure that. The surface gets slightly uneven in the heat curing process and the often rough fillers that were used to cut costs also added to this effect which gives it a more organic feel than what we have come accustomed to from other moulded resins (modern plastics are usually almost pure plasticines, i.e. no "filler" per se, only stabilisers, dyes etc.) and it is still occasionally used by manufacturers that have been using the material for a long time but there are few enough of them to make it's modern usage something of a novelty.
Balanced Ternary See --> Ternary
BeNeLux = Belgium, Nederland (Holland) and Luxembourgh.
Common shorteing for the countries that are sometimes referred to as the European Lowlands, since these countries are relatively small both in population and in size it is as common as not to see distribution being handled for them collectively rather than individually.
Binary
The representation of number in powers of 2, this is the basis for most (but not all) digital systems, see also Ternary.
Binaural
2 channel stereo, but since stereo has become almost synonymous with 2 channels the usage of this word is these days mostly to identify recordings made with high degree of channel separation which may in extreme cases make them sound odd on anything but headphones. See : Kunstkopf..
Bit
One binary digit, i.e. either 0 or 1 (on or off, true or false etc.), the smallest possible amount of information.
Boring See --> Engineers
Brown Goods
As opposite to White Goods, refers to the types of electric household products that were traditionally brown in colour, in modern usage this refers to the household products that are used for entertainment purposes.
Buffer
A device or (in digital systems) an area of memory that is used to temporarily store information for use elsewhere in the device, this technique is used either for convenience or for security reasons usually when a part of the device cannot handle the amount of information required or when a device cannot be expected to respond in real time. Alternativly : A circuit that provides electrical isolation for a device, a buffers input having a much higer Impedance that it's output.
Byte
Originally defined as unit of information processed as one by a digital unit and is often used as such in audio devices, however in modern usage especially when it comes to computers it is almost always used to represent 8 bits regardless of the number of bits processed and hence post 1980 units of bits processed at once have usually been referred to as words.
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