Audio: Noise Canceling Headphone Review

The NY Times (US, center-left newspaper) has a review of noise canceling headphones just in time for the summer vacation air travel peak. Two entries joined Bose at the top of the list - Panasonic and Audio-Technica. They didn't surpass Bose (which is relatively hard to do in this market niche), but equaled it on performance and beat Bose on price (relatively easy to do!).

Things to note:

1. Over-the-ear designs provide better noise cancellation.
   
2. On-ear designs are smaller (and therefore take up less room in one's carry-on bag).
3. The article didn't review in-ear earphones, which, in my opinion, offer better noise isolation than noise-canceling headphones and are much smaller, but suffer from not being as comfortable for extended use.

Why should audio forensic professionals be interested, other than just because they are often audiophiles to begin with? The answer is because of their sometimes challenging work environments. Simply put, all audio forensic filtering doesn't occur in pristine laboratory conditions. Then again, if you've ever spent time in many police audio "labs", you know they aren't always pristine in an audio (or any other) sense! I remember being invited into the lab of a federal level audio forensic examiner, which doubled as her office also, by the way. She opened the door and we squeezed into what was obviously a converted broom closet. Talk about resonances right in the speech band! Sigh...

But I digress. Audio filtering sometimes even has to be done in the field, which in urban environments can be quite noisy. So, as you can see, audio forensic examiners and audio technicians both can benefit from noise canceling and noise isolating headphones and earphones.

Computer Audio: Audition 3 in the works and an audio forensics wish list

First it was a rumor and now it is confirmed - Adobe Audition 3 is in development and Adobe plans to announce more about it later this year. A search of their web site didn't yield any additional details but there is a post on Hart Shafer's blog (Hart's Audition) that confirms it and mentions that it is on a different schedule than the rest of their Creative Suite. Hart Shafer is the product manager for Adobe's studio products, which includes Audition.

Admittedly, audio forensics is a small, niche market away from their core customer base, but if we are lucky, our needs will overlap the needs of their studio customers and a fine product will become even more useful to us. From a forensics point of view, here are the things that I have on my wish list:

• Improve support for working with multi-channel WAV files that are not intended for surround sound, including easy trimming of multiple channels and saving, for starters.
• Speed up loading of large multi-channel files
• Improve the spectrogram interface to allow easy and accurate display and analysis of specific frequencies.
• Include an option to decrease the streamlining (in other words, an "option to allow more options")
  

If you have anything to add to the list, just email me (link found on right side, near the top - don't forget to remove the anti-spam text!) or post a comment.

Courtroom: Accreditation of Forensic Expert Witnesses & Daubert in UK

The issues of introducing accreditation for forensic expert witnesses and Daubert hearings have again been raised in the UK, this time in response to recent acquittals (where both sides had expert witnesses that disagreed) and the conviction of Gene Morrison on 20 counts of deceptively representing himself as a forensic expert with academic qualifications.

Several interesting things are discussed in this article (which basically reads like an opinion piece), including Daubert, whether a case should proceed when there is a serious dispute over forensic evidence, registration and accreditation of forensic expert witnesses, and the effect of privatizing forensic science service organizations.

(Hat Tip: TimesOnline, UK)