John Vanderkooy, one of our department’s retired physics professors, was honoured at the Reproduced Sound 2018 conference held 27-29 November 2018 in Bristol, UK, being presented with the 2018 Peter Barnett Memorial Award. This award is presented annually to a recipient who has made significant contributions to reproduced sound, and audio and electroacoustics education. John did not attend the conference, but on Nov. 29th presented a 1-hour video lecture on Highlights of a Career in Audio and Electroacoustics, followed by a long Q & A session held via Skype to the conference attendees. The picture shows him with the handsome crystal award token.
Born in the Netherlands, John’s family emigrated to Canada when he was very young. He received all of his education in Canada, with a B.Eng. degree (1963) and a Ph.D. in physics (1967), both from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. After a two-year postdoctoral appointment at the University of Cambridge in the UK, he was personally recruited to the University of Waterloo by John Leech, a former department chair. A well-like and well-respected teacher, John has taught mechanics, optics, solid state physics, electronics, and the physics of hi-fi -- and a 2nd year quantum mechanics course in which we are told he really screwed up Bell’s inequality (though we are uncertain about that).
For some years, John followed his doctoral interests in high magnetic-field low-temperature physics of metals. Since the late 1970's however, his research interests have been mainly in audio and electroacoustics. John is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), a recipient of its Silver Medal and several Publication Awards. Over the years he has contributed a wide variety of technical papers in such areas as loudspeaker crossover design, electroacoustic measurement techniques, dithered quantizers, and acoustics. Together with his colleague Stanley Lipshitz and a number of graduate students they form the Audio Research Group at the University of Waterloo. Important contributions were papers on dither in digital audio and MLS measurement systems. John brings an academic point of view to the AES.
John retired from the University of Waterloo in 2006, but has remained active in our department, supervising a few graduate students in the intervening years. Over the years he has spent sabbatical research leaves at the University of Maryland, Chalmers University in Gothenburg, the Danish Technical University in Lygnby, the University of Essex in the UK, the Bang & Olufsen research centre in Struer, Denmark, and Philips National Labs in Eindhoven.
John’s complete video lecture is available for those who request it, and he has made available his powerpoint presentation that was used during the lecture. This presentation has some interesting audible demonstrations of dither, which show that digital audio truly has analogue resolution far below the least significant bit. Dither is related to Stochastic Resonance, which was a hot topic in physics for more than 20 years ago.
