As sound reinforcement and concert touring systems have evolved over the three and a half decades since the late sixties, the emphasis has been on raising their SPL and dispersing the ever-increasing decibels to increasing numbers in the audience. The laws of economics have dictated that concert performers and tour operators can generate more income - or cut decrease their losses, depending on your perspective - by spending less time touring and playing to larger audiences on shorter tours. Thus, manufacturers have been designing loudspeakers for larger clubs, venues and auditoria. However, the old standard of publishing distortion figures has mysteriously disappeared with this evolution. Are audiences being short-changed? Tony Andrews at Funktion One seems to be one loudspeaker innovator who thinks so.

'As decibel levels have increased over the years, it has led to more stress on the loudspeaker components resulting in further distortion,' Andrews says at his Beare Green headquarters in Surrey, England. 'It's louder now than ever, but it's certainly not clean. This is almost a health issue - it's the difference between junk food and a healthy, balanced diet.'

Andrews isn't plugging his Resolution loudspeakers here, however, he's simply irritated with the state of the current industry, having stepped inside one venue too many with a poor acoustic and a badly set up and over-stressed sound system. 'To many, like myself, distortion is more damaging than the actual sound levels being pushed. This is because distortion is often clipped signal. When you have a smooth sinusoidal waveform with the top chopped off leaving very sharp corners approximating to a square wave, it contains excessive amounts of unwanted harmonics, which I think is very unnatural. Our ears and minds are not designed to cope with such waveforms for lengthy periods of time. If responsibility and care is not taken, then the whole industry is going to be faced with draconian level legislation, where in fact the real culprit is distortion.

'The worst offenders are clubs, where DJs generally operate a system by running their mixers solidly into the red. There isn't much you can do with the signal after that. 'Would you go down to the shops in your car with the accelerator pedal pressed firmly to the floor? So why would you drive a loudspeaker over the edge?' Ironically, a large share of Funktion One's business comes from the dance and DJ market.

'In my opinion, distortion means twisting further away from the truth and is the opposite of fidelity, and is very easy to end up with. Commonly, it occurs with over-driving the input or output levels, but it can come in many varieties and can be introduced at any point in the signal path. However, the most damning examples of distortion are offered by loudspeakers. For instance, speakers can have such a high level of harmonic distortion that it can be actually louder than the fundamental original signal. This huge amount of unwanted extra noise actually makes the system sound louder, particularly as the nature of the unwanted noise gives rise to pain, which humans associate with level. This is the complete opposite experience of loud sound that is clean and transparent.'

Not surprisingly, Andrews is carefully picking and choosing the dealers and distributors who are to represent Funktion One abroad. Box shifters they are not. Indeed, Andrews seems to be heading a crusade in many ways for what he perceives the sound reinforcement industry should stand for. 'There appears to be a dearth of published distortion figures for most speaker systems on the market these days, which was not the case in the past,' he says. 'I can only conclude that the industry has, therefore, gone backwards and there has been a consensus not to publish embarrassing specifications anymore. Overall we have exchanged purity for level.'

Andrews questions the engineers and tour operators who make their living from concert-goers and clubbers. 'There are many so-called audio engineers who have lived with awful sound systems for so long that they have no idea what they are talking about. I don't find this in Japan or the Far East, however, where they haven't had to accept the norm of over-driven systems as has happened in the West over the past three decades. They have been over-burdened with the Western culture and I sincerely identify with their sensitivity as well as respecting their culture. The engineers in Japan are not the same egocentric maniacs we have in the West but they do tend to use their eyes more than their ears when mixing.

'Crushing levels are not what the audio experience is about. It's about internal space. The current state of live performances is an abuse of the fee-paying audiences putting up with offensive sound systems. Audio technology has come a long way since we first started putting sound systems in cinemas some 70 years ago, but all we're doing is making the systems more powerful without looking at the distortion levels. It's like expecting a Trabant [an old East German car noted for its ugliness and poor performance] and expecting it to perform like a Formula One racing car.'