Daniel Casado began with the panel and audience introducing themselves. He showed some of the popular audio reference books and instrumentation such as the oscilloscope and realtime analyzer.

The questions typically resulted in some extended discussions and sidebars. A question on how can you check a garage sale speaker out lead to discussions on speaker tests and construction. An inquiry about how you decide how big a speaker cabinet will be resulted in talk about Thiele-Small parameters and cabinet construction. A question on word clocking setups continued with jitter and analog/digital design discussions. Thoughts on surround recordings were discussed, as well as deciding whether headphone break-in is real or not.

A question on mastering hardware and software was fortuitously aided by the arrival of Rick Fisher of Seattle's RFI Mastering, who graciously added his expertise to the panel.

After a refreshment break, door prizes provided by McCauley Sound were given out, including wavelength tape measures and T-Shirts.

We continued with more questions and discussions, such as:

• What is the AES, and why should I join?
• Is louder better? This lead to discussion of loudness wars, hearing fatigue, and hearing hearing loss.
• A comment on acoustic testing and use of the %Alcons test resulted in talk about room acoustics, room tests, and speaker placement.
• A question on FCC regulations for sound levels on TV resulted in some discussion on RMS and other measurement methods, psychoacoustics and bandwidth limiting.
• Daniel Casado explained uses of the wavelength tape measures that some people won for door prizes.

Discussions also continued with subwoofer placement, speaker arrays, and modelling software.

A full afternoon of interesting discussions felt very worthwhile for the few attendees, and the experiment deserves more consideration as a worthy outreach technique.