And no, I won't do stereo. There are good reasons.

I'd be curious to know what they are.

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Stereo In The Aircraft

RST does not produce any stereo intercoms, audio panels, headsets, or other
devices that

reproduce stereo music. If you are absolutely determined to have stereo in
your aircraft, you

might just as well stop reading now, because anything we have to say isn't
going to change your

mind.

We made a conscious business and engineering decision not to produce any
product for stereo.

There are good aviation and engineering reasons for this.

First, a little background music or listening to the ballgame in a cockpit
environment isn't all

that bad. Sometimes flying is miles and miles of nothing but miles and
miles. On the other

hand, I know from my own love of music that when there is a particularly
good cut playing on my

home stereo and I have the headphones on (try "Sweet Sir Galahad" by Baez or
"Minstrel Of The

Dawn" by Lightfoot at somewhere slightly below the threshold of pain in the
'phones to see what I

mean) that I get totally lost within the music and the world just sort of
blurs away. Just

about the LAST thing I want in an airplane is a pilot that has zoned out on
music and is just

holding the controls to have something to do with their hands. That's item
#1.

Second, stereo is expensive. Yes, I understand that FLYING is expensive,
too, but to go to the

expense of specially-designed headphones, intercoms, audio panels, and all
the rest of it seems

to us to be on the other side of reasonable. Our company thrust has, and
always will be, to make

flying affordable for everybody. That's point #2.

Now to the engineering stuff. Suppose you try and take your stereo headset
and fly in somebody

else's airplane that is "regular airplane". Will your stereo headset work
without the trick

little switch on the cable to convert it to a monophonic headset? No, you
will hear one ear of

the conversation only. And what did that little switch do? It put both
earphones in parallel,

which cut the impedance of the headset in half. Properly designed, this
MIGHT not be noticeable

to the aircraft radio, or it might. Since airplane radios weren't designed
to figure out whether

or not you were messing around with a stereo headset, the manufacturer
didn't worry about making

sure his radio would drive that low of an impedance.

Even worse, if somebody else takes his standard aircraft headset and puts it
into your stereo

airplane jack, it will short out one of the channels. Depending on the
design of the intercom,

the best you can hope for is that one stereo channel will be dead in
everybody's headphones.

Second worst is that the short on that channel will blow out the amplifier
for that channel. In

a really lousy design, that short will cause the whole intercom/audio panel
to fail, leaving you

without any headphone audio at all.

Given all these reasons, RST has decided not to produce any stereo
equipment. While it probably

won't sway your decision for stereo in your airplane, we thought you should
at least consider

these problems.

Jim

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