Techron TEF-10
A time-delay-spectrometry analyzer that became the reference ear for a generation of acousticians, even when its own digital guts were showing their age.
Overview
The Techron TEF-10 shows up in the background of countless studio and loudspeaker stories without ever being the star. It was a time-delay-spectrometry analyzer - that's the TEF in the name. It let engineers take quasi-anechoic measurements in rooms that were anything but anechoic. That made it indispensable to people designing monitors, tuning installs, and chasing down the last few dB of a room's low end.
A period account of a monitor-system build shows what the TEF-10 could do. Designer Munro was voicing a large multi-way monitoring system. The crossover network and component choices were made on-site using data gathered with a Techron TEF-10 analyzer. Munro is quoted saying that without time-delay spectrometry to provide anechoic measuring conditions, it would have been far more difficult to obtain clean data at that point in the project. The system was reported to deliver up to 140 dB SPL on transient peaks, and a conventional measurement mic in a real room would have been hopeless there.
By the end of its run, the TEF-10 was not state-of-the-art. A March 1990 Sound and Communication (March 1990, p.26) survey of testing and instrumentation said so bluntly: the TEF system's circuitry and microprocessor architecture were behind the digital signal processing systems used in the newest data-acquisition gear. The same piece noted that Techron and Syn-Aud-Con had run training courses for TEF users, but that the TEF system represented a commitment in both money and training time.
By early 1990 Techron was already announcing the TEF 12+ analyzer. It would run all the standard TEF software, but with greater speed and storage. Upgrade kits were offered for the TEF-10 and TEF-12. So the TEF-10 had a documented upgrade path and a successor family, and the original units kept doing the job they were bought for.
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