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Arbitron Builds Listening Lab For Portable People Meter

Arbitron Builds Listening Lab For Portable People Meter

The Arbitron Company has completed a low-noise, acoustically accurate “critical listening room” in its research and technology center in Columbia, Md. The room is to be used in the development of the next generation of audio encoders for the portable people meter system.
The PPM is a new audience measurement system in which consumers carry a pager-size device that detects inaudible station identification codes. The first large scale U.S. test will be conducted in Philadelphia in fourth-quarter 2000.
Francis Manzella Design Ltd. of Yorktown Heights, N.Y, built the floated room. He usually designs areas for recording and post-production.
The specs are for a noise floor of NC-20 or lower, and a RT-60 reverb time, which is less than 0.4 seconds across the spectrum. The room was outfitted with an STC-49 door.
The concrete floor sits on springs for isolation from the building. Opposite layers of drywall and soundboard are sandwiched between studs, and the stud cavities contain sound-attenuating insulation.
According to Frank Manzella, president of the design firm, said, “The room we designed has a flat frequency response for playback through high-quality speakers so that all parts of the audio program can be evaluated critically.”
– Paul Cogan

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