Bench Talk

Industrial designers are always looking for ways to improve user interface controls by combining functionalities of rotary switches, pushbuttons, trackballs, potentiometers, and touchscreens. In doing so, they can save on component costs and streamline the user experience. Now, Touch Encoder technology is available that helps modernize and simplify designs, while also making it much easier to support applications with multiple languages or configurations.

Have you ever knowingly encountered a chatbot? A recent experience left me frustrated, yet smiling when I realized that “Albert, the Customer Service Agent” was really “Albert, the AI Chatbot.” Even cooler is that “Albert, the AI Chatbot” was good enough to have fooled me into thinking I was talking to a human.

Flops in technological development are nothing new, but how do they relate? They were led by bright minds who ignored customer sentiment.

Hearables—computing devices that fit into your ears and primarily use an audio interface—received a boost with the launch of Apple’s AirPods wireless earbuds last year. However, AirPods are just a tentative first step for hearables, which are a potentially huge market that still seems up for grabs for whoever can developer a killer product.

As a Senior Technology Specialist, I am always interested and looking at the most advanced technologies and applications. When it comes to audio, I recently became aware of something that I had never really spent any time on considering, the ubiquitous resistor. I had soldered oodles of them on to various guitar effects and amplifier repairs over the years, but have never spent much real time investigating their sonic qualities.

I’ve always been fascinated by the audiophile community, as it strives to achieve the absolute best possible audio fidelity, and in the late ‘60s and ‘70s I read magazines like Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, and yes, Stereo Review and High Fidelity cover to cover. I marveled at the insanely-expensive equipment I couldn’t possibly afford but did everything I could within my severely restricted budget to create a system that delivered high-quality audio. I treated my (now-scorned) Shure V15 Type IV cartridge and records like they were gold, built my own speakers, and performed rudimentary testing on them. I was in pseudo-audiophile heaven.

It’s always interesting to take a look back in history to learn a little about the companies responsible for helping us get where we are today. Even better, it’s good to see products that changed our world when they were developed by companies we still do business with today. That said, a colleague directed me to a website filled with a lot of gems from radio broadcast/ audio history and as I was looking through the website I found a surprising advertisement from a Belden, a manufacturer that Mouser Electronics supplies today, once known as Belden Manufacturing.

Every now and then you come across a real gem on the internet. My father was a Coast Guard electronics technician early in his career, and it’s interesting to be able to talk with my dad about electronics stuff. This morning he sent me a link to a site with old Broadcasting and Audio Engineering magazines going back to the 1920s. I look at this ad in Figure 1 from Audio Engineering of June 1949 and have to ask: “What is a Triode?” Triodes are vacuum tubes, boys and girls. Isn’t it interesting that audiophile “purists” today would buy these very tubes for a glowing, more thrilling audio experience? Admittedly, tubes are more interesting to look at than solid state.

The wearable market is generating a lot of interest at the moment. Recent announcements by Apple, and earlier announcements from Intel and others have generated numerous articles in the major publications dedicated to the tech and retail electronics markets. So what about audio wearables?

Recently I attended the 137th Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention in Los Angeles. If you aren’t familiar with the AES Convention it’s a small event that hosts a pro audio trade show along with a wide range of technical sessions for design engineers developing new audio products. This year the AES technical programs featured a product design track that covered networked audio, analog-to-digital (A/D) and Digital-to-Analog (D/A) design for high-resolution audio (HRA). Some of the best producers, recording engineers, and audio hardware designers in the world attend to participate in workshops and make themselves available for questions. If you’re designing products that include audio and have never attended the convention you might want to consider looking into next year’s convention.