RIAA revisited, or how to better judge documented figures

Hans Polak noticed that the noise specifications of RIAA preamps are often given in units and operation conditions that make it hard to easily judge the comparative merits of different designs. He set out to develop a model that can be applied to translate' such specifications to a common base for easy comparison; to find out what weighting should be applied to the result to obtain a noise figure that reflects human perception, and to find a S/N ratio that should be considered as the minimum acceptable for good reproduction.