Same Facts. Same Order. Every Time.

Same Facts. Same Order. Every Time.

Same Facts. Same Order. Every Time.

Pascal founder and CTO Jesper Lind Hansen on CEDIA’s RP1, and why the amplifier specification sheet stopped being a comparison tool.

Since October 2025, Pascal founder and CTO Jesper Lind Hansen has been part of the working group developing RP1, a CEDIA recommended practice that asks manufacturers to publish product performance in a single standardized format. The first document, covering loudspeakers, is now out in the industry. Amplifiers are next.

Ahead of CEDIA Expo in Denver, we sat down with him to talk about what the work involves, why it has taken years rather than months, and what happens to a market when everyone finally has to state their numbers the same way.

The problem with a number

Let’s start with the obvious question. Why does an amplifier company care about a documentation standard?

Because documentation is where our industry is weakest. We spend years getting the engineering right and then describe it in a format nobody can meaningfully compare against anything else. That is a strange thing to have accepted. The engineering is rigorous. The reporting is not.

What does “can’t compare” mean concretely? A power rating is a number.

It is a number, but it is not a measurement until you know the conditions. Take rated output power. That figure depends on the load impedance you measured into. It depends on how many channels you were driving at the same time. It depends on the test signal, whether that is a continuous sine wave, a burst, or something with the crest factor of real program material. It depends on how long you held it, because thermal behavior is not instantaneous. It depends on the distortion threshold you chose to quote at; the same amplifier gives you one figure at 0.1 percent THD and a noticeably larger one at 10 percent. And it depends on your mains voltage, and on whether the unit was cold or had been working for half an hour.

Change any one of those and the number moves, sometimes substantially. Most datasheets do not state all of them. So you have two amplifiers, two numbers, and no way of knowing whether the two numbers describe the same thing.

That sounds like an accusation.

It is not, and I want to be careful there, because it would be easy to read it that way. Very few people in this industry are trying to mislead anyone. What actually happens is simpler and more forgivable. When there is no agreed method, everyone picks their own reasonable one. Each choice is defensible in isolation. Multiply that across an industry over a couple of decades and the specification sheet quietly stops working as a comparison tool. Nobody designed that outcome. It accumulated.

And RP1 is the correction.

RP1 is an agreement on the method and on the format. The comparison everyone reaches for is the nutritional panel on food packaging, and it is a good analogy because it captures both halves. You standardize what gets measured, and you standardize the order it appears in. You do not have to be a nutritionist to read one, and the numbers on one package mean the same thing as the numbers on the next.

That is what we are after. Same facts, same order, every time. It is not a ranking and it is not a review. It does not say which product is better. It says what each product does, in terms that let a professional decide for themselves.

Why the loudspeaker document matters

The first RP1 document covers loudspeakers rather than amplifiers.

Why does the loudspeaker document matter to you, as an amplifier company?

Because the chain runs that way. If you are engineering a system properly, you start from the sound pressure level you need at the listening position, with the headroom real program material demands. From there you work back to what the loudspeaker can produce, and its sensitivity tells you what voltage you have to deliver to reach that level. Only then do you know what the amplifier has to do.

Which means the loudspeaker data has to be right first, and expressed in the right terms. Stating sensitivity in voltage rather than in watts looks like a technicality until you realize it is the thing that connects the loudspeaker to the amplifier. Amplifiers are voltage sources. If sensitivity is stated as a voltage, and impedance across frequency is stated honestly, then the amplifier requirement follows arithmetically instead of by rule of thumb.

And today it is rules of thumb?

Often, yes. Or experience, which is more respectable but does not scale and cannot be handed to anyone else. A good integrator with twenty years behind them will get it right most of the time. That knowledge does not transfer to the person who joined last year, and it cannot be defended to a client who asks why the system costs what it costs.

Which makes this a commercial problem, not only an engineering one.

Very much so. If you cannot show your work, you cannot charge for it. An integrator who can put a number on the performance a system will deliver, and show how it was derived, is selling engineering. An integrator who cannot is selling boxes and competing on the price of those boxes. Margins in this industry are under pressure. Objective data is one of the few things that pushes back.

The uncomfortable question

Is standardized disclosure bad for manufacturers? You are asking everyone to show their homework.

For some, yes, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. If your published figures depend on a favorable measurement condition you do not disclose, a standard format is going to be uncomfortable. Some numbers will come down.

If your product does what you claim when it is measured properly, this is close to the best thing that could happen to you. Today a manufacturer who measures conservatively is punished for it. Their honest number sits next to somebody else’s optimistic one and looks worse. Standardization removes that penalty. I would rather compete on that basis, and I think most engineers would.

Does it also commoditize? If everyone reports identically, products start to look interchangeable.

I would argue the opposite. Standardized reporting does not make products the same. It makes the differences visible. At the moment, genuine engineering differences get lost in the noise because a buyer has no reliable way to see them. Give people a comparable format and real differences in thermal behavior, in sustained output, in distortion under load, in how a product performs in the second minute rather than the first second, all become legible. That is not commoditization. It is the opposite.

What standardization does threaten is differentiation that only exists on paper. I am comfortable with that.

Slow by design

RP1 has been in development for a while.

It is, and it should be. You only get to set the method once. If you get it wrong you do not fail loudly, you make the problem permanent, because now everyone is measuring the same wrong thing and the format has authority behind it. That is worse than what we have today.

So every specification gets argued over at length, by people who disagree, in the open. It is slow, occasionally frustrating, and absolutely the correct speed for this kind of work.

Where does it stand now?

The loudspeaker document is out in the industry and being taught. Amplifiers are ahead of us. That is the one I am most interested in, for fairly obvious reasons.

What should manufacturers do in the meantime?

Start stating your conditions now. You do not need a published document to tell you what load, what signal, how many channels, at what distortion and for how long. Any manufacturer can add that to a datasheet this quarter. The ones who do it before they are asked will find the transition easy, and will have said something about themselves in the process.