A musician-engineer urging audio engineers to acquire a musical education writes --can the audio engineer depend on his instruments and leave esthetic matters to the musician? The answer is, yes and no. Probably most audio engineers do just this. Certainly the instruments are necessary, but it may be questioned whether they are sufficient. For one thing, the problem of the audio system that -measures good and sounds bad- remains. In this day of sophisticated electronic instrumentation, there is still no instrument or group of instruments which can measure the -listening quality- of an amplifier. In addition, audio engineers striving for perfection are severely handicapped by the lack of -textbook- specifications on how to design a high quality amplifier. In most other electronic equipment the design criteria can easily be determined. From that point the economic factors usually determine how close we come to the design objectives.
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