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ASANews
Standards Committee Meeting
Reports:
ISO/TC 43 (Acoustics) and ISO/TC 43/SC 1 (Noise), Milan, Italy, September 2015
Robert D. Hellweg, Jr.
13 Pine Tree Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02482 USA
Hellweg@HellwegAcoustics.com
Jeff G. Schmitt
ViAcoustics, 2512 Star Grass Circle, Austin, Texas 78745 USA
jeffs@ViAcoustics.com
Laura Ann Wilber
422 Skokie Boulevard, Wilmette, Illinois 60091 USA
l-wilber@northwestern.edu
The objective of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) “Robert W. Young Travel Awards for Support of the Devel- opment of International Standards in Acoustics” is to pro- vide limited financial support to assist individual experts to participate in the development of International Standards prepared by International Standards Organization Commit- tees ISO/TC43 (Acoustics) and ISO/TC43/SC 1 (Noise) as well as by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Committee IEC/TC29 (Electroacoustics).
An ASA member who is expert in a technical field applicable to one or more working groups (WGs) of IEC/TC29, ISO/ TC43, or ISO/TC43/SC1 and is willing to commit to contrib- ute to the development of drafts and to actively participate in WG meetings may apply for this award. Recipients shall be US citizens living in the United States and be self-employed, an employee of a small firm, semiretired, or retired.
The 2015 Robert W. Young Travel Award recipients were Robert Hellweg, Jeff Schmitt, and Laura Ann Wilber.
Highlights of Meetings
TC43, SC1, and most of their WGs meet at approximately 18-month intervals to address issues and ensure progress in standards development. Their most recent meetings were in Milan, Italy, in September 2015.
The United States was also represented in the WGs by Elliott Berger, Patricia Davies, Kevin Lai, Travis McColley, Doug- las Moore, Brad Moulton, Chadwyck Musser, Paul Schomer, and Douglas Winker. The United States participated in all three of the TC43/WG meetings and seven of the nine SC1/ WG meetings.
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Figure 1. The United States delegation to ISO/TC43/SC1 ple- nary meeting in Milan on September 17, 2015. Left to Right: Douglas Moore, Laura Ann Wilber, Kevin Lai, and Robert Hellweg.
TC43/WG1 (Threshold of Hearing), with Wilber participat- ing, discussed several standards in the International Stan- dards Organization (ISO) 389 series, some of which are be- ing revised. Most of the standards considered by WG1 are contained in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) S3.6 (Audiometers). ISO has a standard for each transducer, whereas ANSI S3.6 has it all in one document. Generally, the reference equivalent threshold sound pressure levels (RETSPLs) are the same in the ISO and ANSI standards.
There was a discussion on voting on ISO/DIS 7029 (Statisti- cal Distribution of Hearing Thresholds as a Function of Age) in which the United States voted negative because there was not enough information on why the standard needed to be changed and exactly what information went into the change. The project leader agreed to prepare a paper describing the threshold calculation procedure in detail along with a reso- lution of comments in addition to a proposed layout of ISO/ FDIS 7029.
TC43/WG8 (Anechoic Qualification), with Schmitt as con- vener, and SC1/WG28 (Machinery Noise), with Hellweg as convener, met jointly and covered the following:
• The final draft amendments on the two standards for qual-
ification of anechoic and hemi-anechoic chambers (ISO 26101 and ISO 3745 Annex A) were approved for inter- national balloting. The first edition of ISO 26101 closed a loophole in ISO 3745 Annex A; however, it inadvertently caused many laboratories that met the criteria in ISO 3745 without using that loophole to no be longer be qualified. The United States discovered this problem and proposed amendments to correct it. Schmitt and Winker provided data that were instrumental in the approval of both of these revisions.
• ISO 3744 is one of the more popular sound power level stan- dards; however, it is considered too complicated by general practitioners. WG28 began working to simplify ISO 3744.
Background