Page 60 - 2018Fall

Sound Perspectives
Christopher J. Struck
Postal:
CJS Labs 57 States Street San Francisco, California 94114-1401 USA
Email:
cjs@cjs-labs.com
Standards Program of the Acoustical Society of America
Introduction
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) has been involved in standards since 1932, shortly after the inception of the Society itself. At that time, standards were primarily developed to support manufacturing and mechanical processes. Today, acoustical standards help advance scientific discovery, simplify product develop- ment, reduce unnecessary duplication of effort, increase productivity and lower costs, and permit interoperability and compatibility. They also promote safety and protect key environmental resources. Standards are the embodiment of practical applications of acoustics and, as such, are at the core of the mission of the Soci- ety (Embleton et al., 2004). A historical timeline of the ASA Standards Program, highlighting significant events, is shown in Figure 1. Note that in 1992, the ASA Standards Program was ranked 3rd out of 42 standards programs in the Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives (CESSE) survey.
Figure 1. Historical timeline and key events of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Stan- dards Program. See text for abbreviations.
Three primary sources of funding support the ASA Standards Program. Two sources, sales of standards and organizational membership fees, cover approxi- mately 75% of costs. The remainder is made up by a subsidy from the ASA.
The American National Standards Institute
and the Voluntary Consensus Process
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a nonprofit, nongovernment, private sector membership organization that is the coordinator of voluntary stan- dards development in the United States. ANSI does not does not develop stan-
58 | Acoustics Today | Fall 2017 | volume 13, issue 3 ©2017 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.