The present paper and part 2 (adjacent) study the sound field produced by a convected point quadrupole embedded in and moving along the axis of a round plug-flow jet. Only subsonic eddy convection velocities are considered. We examine cold jets here and hot jets in part 2. A principal feature of the study is extensive comparison with jet-noise data. It appears that this simple model problem succeeds in explaining all the major interesting features of jet-noise data, on both hot and cold jets, for jet exit velocities in the low supersonic range. Particular success is achieved in explaining aspects of the data not explainable by the Lighthill acoustic-analogy approach. The picture of jet-noise generation that emerges (at least for jet velocities in the low supersonic regime) is in many respects a striking reaffirmation of the Lighthill point of view. It appears that there is an intrinsic or universal distribution of compact quadrupoles, whose strength and frequency distribution scale with the jet velocity and nozzle diameter as would be expected from simple dimensional reasoning, responsible for jet-noise generation. These quadrupoles are of course convected by the mean flow and satisfactory agreement with the data is obtained by assuming that they are devoid of any intrinsic directionality. There appears to be no significant jet Mach number (compressibility) or jet temperature effect on the scaling of this intrinsic distribution. The essential improvement over the Lighthill analysis is the incorporation of mean-flow shrouding effects on the radiation of the convected quadrupoles. It is perhaps no exaggeration to claim that, with the incorporation of such a shrouding effect, the problem of scaling jet noise with regard to the jet velocity, jet temperature, jet size and the angle from the jet axis appears to be completely resolved. (The ‘scaling’ principle cannot of course be very simply expressed and in fact needs calculations of the sort contained in the present paper to implement it.)