[Interview] Johann Gaus, Germany (Computational Physicist, Audiophile Engineer)

Johann Gaus is a PhD in physics, with a focus on computational physics. In 1995 he founded his own company, initially with consulting activities and later with own products for control processes in the industrial sector.

How did your interest in electroacoustics emerge?

My interest in electroacoustics began as a schoolboy with a disappointment: my own recorded piano performance with a newly given cassette recorder was much further away from the original than I had thought. Relatively quickly it became clear that there was no simple error that could be found and eliminated, but that many complex interrelationships had to be discovered.

Certainly also an influence was the nearby Jesus-Christus Church in Berlin Dahlem, where many sound recordings were made. The sound engineers generously let me observe their work in their recording studio.

Do you think high quality equipment is an essential component of realiable sound reproduction?

With increasing experience came two realizations: 1. professional use of high quality equipment produces truly different, not just better, listening experiences. 2. the quality of the listening experience has to do with waveform fidelity, i.e. the most accurate possible reproduction of every single sound wave of the live situation, but they are not the same. Basically, it’s often about the interplay between loudspeakers and the room.

Do you have any ideas for novel room measurements that could be done with Android devices?

Android devices are very compact and portable. So if you use a plug-in microphone and bluetooth for data transmission, you can measure at very many points in the room with very little effort. This gives you a comprehensive picture of this interaction. you can detect room modes and suddenly understand where intensity fluctuations at different frequencies come from. As the quality of the loudspeakers increases, time accuracy becomes more important. Here, too, this interaction can be decisive.

So you think multiple or variable placements of measurement microphones is an unexplored field in Hi-Fi optimizations?

Yes, because a measurement microphone, for example, does not provide directional information about where reflections are coming from, but this plays an important role in the listening process. From a peak in the impulse response, one can only indirectly conclude reflections at a certain surface.

For a more reliable statement, it should be checked whether the peak moves as expected at other measuring points in the vicinity. If possible, the measurement can of course be repeated after the surface has been covered. In practice, such control measurements are often forgotten.

It is always good if errors can be eliminated by comparing several measurements. Anyway, differences are often more meaningful than absolute values. Ideally, they should be measured in such a way that errors cancel each other out in the process

Where can we follow your work and download your apps?

My main app is play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hifi_apps.sp_setup and on website hifi-apps.com there are more detailed explanations. I am in the process of gradually making the site available in English as well.