Jargon and lingo glossary - N to R.
Neodymium
A metal alloy with dense magnetic field that unlike most other hard magnets with similar characteristics is neither outrageously expensive nor difficult to fabricate, using this material in a transducer such as a pickup or a headphone means higher efficiency and thus in most cases a more accurate sound. Neodyium is a popular Japanese variant on the spelling used by Furuyama Audio Lab (FAL) for instance in their local literature, but that company BTW claims to have invented the alloy in the early 1970's.
NOS = New Old Stock
A new and unused example of a product that is no longer being manufactured and usually outdated. Typically unsold stock from a dealer, distributor or manufacturer.
Nostaklígja
Icelandic slang, a combination of the French word Nostaglia and the Icelandic word klígja which denotes the gall like taste you get in your mouth just before you throw up. Used were a overly romantic view of a bygone era transcends good taste and/or common sense.
NTSC = National Television System Committee
An USA based organisation but this term is usually used to denote the analogue terrestrial broadcasting standard formulated by this committee rather then the organisation itself..
OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer
An OEM is a company that designs and manufactures products for a third party, usually another manufacturer, a brand or a trading entity and the product bears the brand name of the 3d party. This is not to be confused with companies that do not design products but just manufacture them for the company that designed them, those are referred to as subcontractors. Please note however that like subcontractors an OEM manufacturer do not sell their products to end users, dealers or distributors and thus are not responsible for warranties or supplying information on older products etc., that responsibility is on the hands of the supplier of the product. They do however own any IP rights to the devices since they are the originators of the design, that means that while they did make a product they are bound by a contract to their supplier not to give out information on it and usually do not answer queries from end users for that simple reason, but also that the status of the brand that sold the device has no bearing on the intellectual property rights, so even if the company that sold the product originally has ceased trading and their brands and IP has technically or effectively been placed in the Public Domain you cannot distribute or make use of the IP without permission from the OEM.
OFC = Oxygen Free Copper
Copper wires manufactured so that there are no oxygen bubbles inside the wire or rather an absolute practical minimum, the wire is then plated with another material, usually metal, to hinder oxidation from the outside. The plating process is not strictly necessary but should improve performance over the long run since copper oxides are bad conductors, silver oxides are however and one of the reasons some people prefer that material despite quite a considerable more cost.
OFDM = Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
A digital broadcasting technique, the signal is sent out as a Spread-Spectrum with quadrature multiplexing but what makes this different from analogue broadcasting is that pulses are modulated over the zero crossing of the pulse that comes before them, the aliasing errors generated by this are ignored by the receiver since it only needs to work out if each pulse is a 0 or 1 with the exact shape of the pulse being of no importance. This technique is used in the European terrestrial digital TV standard DVB to cram 70 channels or more onto a single broadcast signal and recently Siemens has shown a development of the system that can broadcast 360 Mbps in real live conditions.
Osbourne Effect
Self harm inflicted by a company's marketing department by pre announcing new products while they still have warehouses full of older products. Named after Adam Osbourne, a noted PC & technical writer in the 1970's that founded Osbourne Computers on the proceedings of the sale of his publishing business, this company went on to become the fastest growing computer company ever, but managed to self-destruct when they pre-announced a revolutionary new version of their computer at the same time as the industry was facing a minor slump.
OTL = Output Transformer Less
A design methodology for valve amplifiers but in normal circumstances a transformer needs to be placed between the valves output and the loudspaker terminals for Impedance matching etc. Getting more popular in recent years in search of valve amplifiers with less colouring but in the 40's and 50's most OTL designs were attempting to archive a usable Class B design in search of more output power.
OTR = Old Time Radio
American idiom for recordings from the golden age of radio, which in their case was from the late 1930's into the latter half of the 50's when radio was more a source of information, propaganda and spoken entertainment than a music carrier. TV took over these role fairly quickly after it's introduction and most spoken word production ceased in the 1950 with the exception of religious broadcasts.
PA = Public Announcement
A term used for the types of Sound Reinforcement systems that are specifically designed to carry verbal information rahter than music.
Packrat See --> Magpie
Parallel Interface
A digital interface capable of sending multiplies of bits usually a byte, at each clock cycle, as opposite to serial.
PASC = Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding
A variant of the Musicam perpetual coding & compression system that was developed by Philips for use in the Digital Compact Cassette and early versions of it are very similar to a MPEG layer 1 codec. Basically an audio signal is split into bands in a linear fashion (i.e. same width regardless of the frequency), 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 that the processor thinks is superficial (i.e. silence) is also removed until the data has reached a reduction of 4:1. Much better worked out than its Sony ATRAC counterpart but no development has been done on the codec since 1997 so it's getting a bit stale.
PCB = Printed Circuit Board
A board usually made out of plastic or plastic like materials that has electrical conducting tracks printed upon it, electronic components are soldered onto the board and the conducting tracks become the electrical connections between the components. In most cases the tracks are only printed on one side of the board for economic reasons but were more complex electrical routing is required such as with advanced digital products there may be layers of tracks, this is archived by making very thin boards, a number of which are then glued together to form one board, this type of board is usually referred to as a sandwich.
PCM = Pulse Code Modulation
The most common approach used to convert analogue audio information into digital information.
PD = Phase change Dual disks
A type of rewriteable optical drives drives designed by the Matsushita company, with a maximum capacity of 640 Megabytes, outdated now and were never as reliable as the MO drives from Fujitsu but Matshushita still provides support for the format in newer DVD-RAM drives that utilise similar technology and caddie system which can read older PD disks, so all is not lost if you have music data stored on some of these.
PD = Public Domain
Any sort of intellectual work or IP were the creator of the work has expressively denied any rights to his work or were the rights granted have run out and can thus be used by anyone for any purpose without limitations or restrictions.
Phenol See --> Bakelite
Postscript Media See --> WORM
Power Conditioner
A device intended for use with hi-fi products that "conditions" the electric power signal in order to make your existing system sound better or in the case of transistor amps to be more efficient. This is archived typically through the use of active or passive filtering but more exotic variants exist. This type of device is increasingly popular in countries such as the USA were we see more variations in the quality and age of electrical installations and infrastructure than we typically see in other western countries and in the UK were standards and work practices in electrical wiring date back to the stone age, but theoretically a conditioner (depending on design) should offer at the least a minimal benefit to any system regardless. We first see these units in used in the medical sector were they were used to shield very sensitive equipment from minor variations in input voltages and shapes but those devised leaked into the hi-fi world in the 80's. You should not confuse them with battery based power back-up devices, these have an electrical output that is not sinusoidal which may cause trouble with audio equipment with linear power supplies, in particular with amplifiers since the further away from a pure sinus wave the power signal is the less efficient the amplifier becomes. There do exist however battery based power conditioners that mix rechargeable battery technology with more normal filtering techniques to create ultra pure sinus waves, these are rare and expensive however. Alternativly : A device expressively designed to con nonplussed audiophiles out of money.
Prussia (Pruss, Prússland)
A Baltic country in northern Europe that stretched from Lithuania in the east to northern Germany in the west, was one of the states that unified into Germany in the latter half of the 19th century.
Psychoacoustic Masking
Actually a set of techniques used to "fool" the ear or rather to get around various shortcomings in devices or techniques by exploiting certain defects, non-linearietes and other abnormalities in how your ears work and how the brain makes use of audio information. The simplest and the most commonly seen technique is to make use of the integration tendencies of your ears, for instance you cannot detect distortions that are less than 1ms since the ear will simply ignore them and integrate what became before and after into one distortion free sound, so if a distortion can be shaped into extremely sharp transients by concentrating the energy, you will not hear it.
PWM = Pulse Width Modulation
In amplifiers : A technique were an audio signal is converted into pulses with the width of the pulse representing it's slope, the pulse signals are sent to a dual output stage that switches between + and - and the speaker then averages out the signal thus reconstructing the slope. Very efficient, typically over 95% in modern examples and theoretically should sound excellent but the switching action of the output sage creates noise and the higher the frequency is, the more noticeable the noise and related distortions are. This technology is widely use in subwoofer applications were this phenomenon is less of a problem. PWM amps are sometimes described as a "digital amplification", that's not quite correct although they can be viewed as hybrids, but it is possible to make a converter less amplifier using this technology and driving it directly with PCM or DSD streams. Better sounding propriety variants of this technology have been developed over the last few years by a handful of companies, they all involve amplifiers operating at very high switching frequencies that use computer circuits to modify the behaviour of the output stage in real time. In electronic music : This term is used when an oscillator playing a pulse waveform has the width of the pulse changed by a signal from another waveform generator, an event generator or a tactile interface.
Quad = Quadraphony
4 channel stereo although some 3D systems that utilised 4 channels also used this term.
R&D = Research and Development
Actually meant to describe the work involved in preparing for future products and/or services, but it's usage is mostly to identify the divisions that perform said work or even the buildings that house them.
RF = Radio Frequencies
Basically all airborne waves that you cannot hear or see, or in other words all parts of the frequency spectrum that fall above or below your hearing threshold, which is typically around from 30 ~ 80 Hz to about 12 ~ 16 kHz for an adult human but varies between individuals (in technical lit. usually 20Hz to 20KHz). Usage is changing slightly, traditionally this was just the parts of the FS that you associated with radio communications (i.e. nothing above microwaves) but lately there is a tendency to include the whole shebang including light waves and even in some cases other radiation etc. BTW radio communications can happen inside the hearing threshold (and have be used as such in extreme cases (submarine comms or LFR, VLFR is/should be below the hearing threshold)), but for obvious reasons not a recommended practice on land, naturally occurring waves in the 50 to 1100 Hz band are sometimes referred to as VLF radio waves but the correct term for them is actually "sound".
RIAA = Record Industry Association of America
USA based association of record manufactures and publishers. On those pages here usually used in reference to the RIAA equalisation curve, but that is a compensation method used on modern microgroove records. Official homepage.
Rochelle Salts = Sodium Potassium Tartrate
Crystal structure that is used in low budget transducer such as microphones and pickups, a very efficient as a transducer and cheap to make but it dries up with age and thus needs replacing every now and then and has for the most part been replaced with ceramic elements which show a similar behaviour but are more robust and have a greatly extended lifetime.
RRP = Recommended Retail Price
A guideline price for a product given out by the manufacturer or distributor as to define a maximum price to be paid for the unit. This is not actually done for the benefit of the customer but for the benefit of the manufacturer since it allows him to set a certain price point for public relations purposes. The definition of this used to be fairly fixed some 30 years ago when retailers got a more or less fixed 40% off an RRP as their purchase price and that meant that price variations were small from retailer to retailer, but changes in business practises have meant that the term has become increasingly loose and some manufacturers use it only as a vague indicator.
RS-232/RS-422
A standard for serial digital communications that is so widespread in the computer and CE industries that the word serial is used as a synonym for it. RS-232 was initially put forward in 1961 as a standard interface for modem control and therefore has terminology which assumes a control unit and a slave but modern variants are fully bi-directional as far as control is concerned. The standard is too slow to carry audio data with modern variants of it not exceeding 115K bits in most cases but this is more than enough to carry control information and program data and it's exactly in those situations were you will find it used. Since even the cheapest low power microcontrollers have a serial port interface built in which means that implementing it is free or at the least only at costly as the connector used from the designers point of view, you will find that audio devices such as DAT recorders, AV amplifiers and even something as cheap and simple as remote controls have external, internal or hidden RS-232 interfaces that can be accessed by technicians for analysis or upgrades, or by end users for remote control, synchronisation or other utilitarian purposes. There was for instance for a time a serial interface on every Sony product that featured a recording button except for the cheapest systems. The latest published standard is RS-232D xxx which incorporates improvements found in CCIT V24 (USA) and in ISO IS2110 (Europe) but there may have been updates to those standards since the last time I fell asleep reading technical manuals. RS-422 is an improvement of the 232 standard that features balanced connections and has data transfer rates of up to 10M bits, now that is enough to carry audio data and you will find variations of this standard used in professional digital audio recorders, most Sony professional digital recorders had this at the least as an option and even DSD interfaces from the company (for recording SACD material) sport such an interface. Other variations on this standard exist including RS-423 (Unbalanced 422 variant) and RS-449 (High speed 232 variant) but are seldom used outside the computer communications industry.
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