Word: optimum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sheer size is a clear departure from the actual forces available in Bach's time for an indoor performance. Richter's ensemble numbers 140 singles and orchestral personnel; Bach's optimum number was less than half that. The Bach Choir's is a modern one, a product of the great symphonies after 1800. Between Bach's time and our own, instruments were generally engineered to be louder and more precise in pitch. Those listening to a cantata in the 1730's were not steeped in a tradition of massive sound; the scale of volume-production then was a fraction...
Restricted Routes. Cost is not the only difficulty. Because it creates a sonic boom when it exceeds the speed of sound, the Concorde will be barred from flying over most populated areas at its optimum speed of Mach 2.05. That limitation will reduce the number of routes on which it can be used; for example, it will not be able to fly super-sonically between New York and Los Angeles or between London and Rome. Even at subsonic speeds, Concorde is hardly an environmental advance: on takeoff it will be as loud as a Boeing 747 and perhaps louder...
...little more than 50% a decade earlier. Their share of industrial profits, however, stayed put at 75%, almost unchanged from 1970. Obviously, smaller companies have been increasing their profitability more rapidly than the large corporations, suggesting perhaps that some of the 500-G.M. excluded-have pushed past their optimum size...
...records. SQ is also designed to be played on conventional stereo rigs, but when that is done, SQ shows a slight but perceptible loss in sharpness of sound. Columbia has not announced any plans to replace the company's regular stereo line with SQ. Even when heard under optimum conditions-at Columbia's laboratories in Stamford, Conn.-SQ is not so much a true four-channel sound as an electronic compromise. For some listeners, at least, the result is an uneasy feeling of aural vagueness...
...Obstetrician-gynecologists are also unevenly distributed; while the national median is 1 to 11,915, the ratio in ten states is only 1 to 20,000. There is also some overabundance, for example, one general surgeon for every 7,554 people in the U.S. today. (By contrast, the optimum general-surgeon-to-population ratio in prepaid group health plans ranges from 1 to 10,000 to 1 to 17,000.) Thus simply training more doctors will not solve the nation's medical dilemma. Instead, as an A.M.A. editorial states, medical schools should persuade more students to forgo glamour specialties...