Product Design | Audio Electronics | Acoustics | DIY | Audio Innovations
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Hegel Unveils H600 Dual Mono Integrated Amplifier and DAC
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Hegel has introduced a new reference integrated amplifier. The H600 is rated for 303 watts in 8 ohms, with a damping factor of 4000, and 2 ohms drive capability - core specifications that Hegel considers are key for an amplifier to drive any speaker with confidence and ease. In line with the company's obsession of dual everything, the amplifier is a dual mono design. It also boasts a state-of-the-art preamplifier with the same extremely precise volume attenuator found in the Hegel reference P30A amplifier. Read More
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TAD Labs New TAD-C1000 Preamplifier Expands Evolution Series
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Technical Audio Devices Laboratories (TAD Labs) officially announced the TAD-C1000 preamplifier, the newest addition to its Evolution Series of hi-fi audio components from the iconic Japanese audio brand. Sharing the design language with existing Evolution Series components including the TAD-D1000TX disc player, TAD-DA1000TX DAC, and TAD-M1000 power amplifier, the TAD-C1000 masterfully amplifies signals from stereo sources without compromise. It connects up to four balanced and two unbalanced components, with amplification for two balanced and two unbalanced outputs . Read More
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New HEAD acoustics ArtemiS SUITE Release 15 Introduces Important Productivity and Feature Enhancements
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HEAD acoustics has overhauled ArtemiS SUITE, its state-of-the-art software platform for sound and vibration, psychoacoustic, and structural dynamics analysis. The new release 15 brings substantial improvements in ease of use, performance, scope of operability, and connectivity. Outstanding features include improved model creation and calculation of transfer functions, export for binaural analysis and synthesis, an updated interface to the Augmented Reality solution from HoloMetrix, and third-party hardware and software support. Read More
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Virscient Collaborates with Infineon to Accelerate AIROC-Based Wireless Design Development
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Virscient announced a new strategic collaboration with Infineon to support customers' design-in of Infineon’s connectivity products. Under this agreement, Virscient will provide expert design and engineering services, and licensable software solutions to help innovative OEMs and platform vendors rapidly deliver products integrating Infineon's AIROC WiFi + Bluetooth combo ICs – whether chip-down, or in modular form. The wireless connectivity integration specialists from New Zealand will offer their Ubiquios embedded connectivity platform. Read More
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How to Get Alexa-Enabled Devices AVS Certified
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Getting AVS certified for your Alexa built-in integrations is no trivial task. Amazon expects OEMs to follow specific processes when building and testing their devices including Acoustics, Security, Music, Functional, and User Experience. David Berol, Director of the Authorized Test Labs for Alexa at Silicon Valley Pioneer Surfaceink, shares his insights on what you need to know about getting your Alexa-enable devices through AVS Certification process. Learn How
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Cirrus Logic Helps Ease PC Industry Transition to New MIPI SoundWire Interface
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Cirrus Logic is offering an advanced audio solution to help ease PC manufacturers' migration to the MIPI SoundWire interface (1.2.1 specification) for a richer, more immersive audio experience. At the heart of the Cirrus Logic advanced, low-power audio solutions are the company’s recently announced CS35L56 smart amplifier and CS42L43 Smart HIFI codec that are included in the Intel SoundWire-ready reference design aimed at helping laptop designers make a smooth migration to the new specification. Read More
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Schiit Designs a USB Streaming Hub with Integrated CD Player
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As always, Schiit Audio stirs up the world of home audio with its unique perspective of the high-fidelity audio chain. This time, Schiit announced Urd, a complete re-invention of a CD player component, now designed as a hub for an entire modern digital audio system. It's basically a CD transport with USB output and digital outs, and a USB hub that can be connected to streamers and other digital sources using the company's Unison USB architecture - now updated for modern USB-C connectors (applause). Urd is available today, from $1299. Read More
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AudioControl Home Audio Division Acquired by AVPro Global
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AVPro Global, a company that started as a distributor and evolved to create its own brands of audio/video installation products, display calibration, and HMDI cables, has announced the acquisition of the Home Audio division of AudioControl from AAMP Holdings, an aftermarket car audio company from Florida that had acquired the Seattle, WA, company in April 2022. AVPro Global says that the AudioControl Home Audio Division makes sense in its strategy to accelerate its business in residential and commercial distributed audio and media rooms. Read More
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Speakerbench YouTube Channel Discusses Loudspeaker Bass Reflex Alignments
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Claus Futtrup and Jeff Candy, the two creators of the Speakerbench online tool for assisting in speaker design calculations, continue to introduce more and more tools and features in this web-based application. To inspire even more of the loudspeaker DIY community, the two authors have created an interesting Speakerbench Youtube channel where people can find new interesting videos discussing the history of speaker design theory and specifically Loudspeaker Bass Reflex Alignments. Read More
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NTT sonority Launches Next Generation of Open-Ear Wireless Earphones Prioritizing Privacy
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NTT sonority, a subsidiary of NTT Corp., Japan's leading telecommunications company, announced the commercial launch of its new nwm MBE001 true wireless open-ear earphones, featuring the company's proprietary Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) technology. Originally promoted through a crowdfunding campaign, the nwm MBE001 earphones are the latest open-ear design to enter the market and the first to focus on privacy by eliminating sound leakage while letting ambient sounds in for utmost situational awareness. Read More
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Guest Editorial
Peter van Willenswaard
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The Birth of the Triode
A Glorious Accident
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I'll be talking about the birth of the electronic valve - I prefer to use the English nomen valve in this story and not the later American term tube for three reasons: 1 – it was the Englishman Fleming who created the first electronic component in history; 2 - most valves were round bulbs at the time and not tubelike cylinders; and 3 - in a triode, the current could be shut down or opened up by means of the grid, just like water in a mechanical valve.
The birth of the valve was by no means planned. No one was looking for an amplifying device, nothing remotely like that: the first two steps on the road to the concept of the electronic valve were set even before the discovery of the electron in 1897 by Thompson. You can't speak of electronics if you don't know that electrons exist.
Before going into details, it pays to look at the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. This was a weird time because of the profound technological revolution taking place, on a scale never seen previously in history. On the contrary, you might be forgiven to think that between the demise of the Roman Empire in the 5th century or so and the end of the Middle Ages lie 10 centuries during which hardly any technological progress was made. One exception that springs to mind is the advance in clockwork artistry in the Late Middle Ages, but on the other hand many advances made by the Romans had been lost by that time, like central heating, how to make concrete for building four-story houses, and the like.
Then, finally, comes a time in which some individuals start to do clever things: the discovery that the earth rotates around the sun, the making of lenses, the basics of Western physics and mathematics, culminating in the very practical invention of the steam engine in the early 19th century. Which after some refinements led to trains and railways halfway through the century, and that proved so successful that by 1890 clocks across the country and across Europe had to be synchronized because without that, timetables for trains would be meaningless.
Imagine: until that moment every city had had its own time... What I mean to say is this: for 10 centuries time had nearly stood still, then for two more centuries some stirring here and there, but relative to that, the 19th century was an explosion.
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Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early experimental wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla on Long Island in 1901–1902, located in the village of Shoreham, NY. A grassroots campaign to save the site succeeded in purchasing the property in 2013, with plans to build a future museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. In 2018, the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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As an example, let's consider Nicolai Tesla. Tesla was mainly concerned with electromagnetic energy stored in coils. The Tesla coil is famous, it is amazingly powerful even by today's standards. People are still building them: see the Internet. Tesla was an advocate of AC electrical power and wisely so (Edison wouldn't have it and stuck to DC all his life), and he built the world's first AC power plant. But Tesla also believed he could surround the earth with an electromagnetic resonant wave and directly feed all the homes in the countryside from that. He never succeeded; he claims his experiments were sabotaged. He did very dangerous experiments with artificial lightning. He claimed energy could be captured for free by lifting a plate high up in the air to collect solar electrical energy and store that in a capacitor: free energy for all! Tesla even built a tower on the East Coast of the US during World War I and claimed he could destroy Enemy Armies thousands of miles away using beamed electromagnetic energy. The authorities tore down the mythical tower before it became operational because neighbors were too scared of it. Tesla had become so excited by all the new developments and possibilities of his time that his imagination went wild. Type Nicolai Tesla in Google, plus maybe Tower, read for an hour or so and you'll see what I mean.
In a time like that Thomas Alva Edison melts a carbon filament wire into a glass bulb, applies a vacuum pump and creates an electric light, which lasts longer than the instantaneous flash of a filament wire in free air. But after a while the glass darkens on the inside. And Edison also notes that when, finally, a filament burns, the break always occurs at the negative side of the wire. Possibly to find a way of preventing the blackening of the glass, he makes a bulb with an extra metal plate inside connected to a lead-out wire. He has already developed a moving coil meter for measuring currents, and connects such a meter to the lead-out wire, possibly to see if he can catch an unknown current and divert it from the glass.
Connecting the other side of the meter to the negative gives nothing, but he does find a current when connecting the meter to the positive. Although the discovery of a current through a vacuum looks like hot news to us, Edison stops there… in 1884. Maybe because the extra plate doesn't prevent the blackening of the glass. He does file a patent, but not for the bulb with the plate but for the moving coil meter - but the first electronic device ever does appear in the drawing of the patent as the object being measured.
One or two of these lamps travel across the Atlantic and end up on the workbench of one John Ambrose Fleming. Fleming is intrigued, and his experiments confirm the findings of Edison. But as we are still two years away from the discovery of the electron, Fleming can get no further, and finally stores the lamps away in a cupboard in 1896. Five years later, Guglielmo Marconi wants to improve upon his Channel stunt, and now cross the Atlantic with his wireless telegraph signals. The detection of the weak signal at the reception side was a problem though. Marconi used a coherer, a device in which iron powder is moved by magnetic fields. It was then that Fleming remembered the Edison plate-lamps and they were subsequently applied successfully as diodes. We're talking 1904 now.
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The STC triode valve, similar to Western Electric type WE205-D, circa 1924.
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Why did Lee de Forest add a third electrode to the diode? Well, he hadn't seen the light, so to speak, he didn't intend to do something revolutionary, he just wanted to be different. De Forest was building telegraphy detectors and he couldn't legally use the two-element device Fleming had brought to Marconi (and because a US competitor of De Forest was using something similar). So, he added a third electrode to escape infringements of patents.
That explains why this third electrode (a plate, by the way, not a grid) ended up in the wrong place: on the other side of the filament, instead of between filament and anode, shown in the image below). He speaks of a “gaseous medium” and “ions” around the filament' (both of which are the last things you would want in a radio valve!) and inserts electromagnets in his circuit expecting to modulate the location of his third electrode.
Conclusion: he had no clue what had fallen into his hands. See the October 1906 patent he filed (No. US841387A).
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Image from U.S. Patent 841,387, published January 15, 1907, for a “device for amplifying feeble electrical currents”.
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In January 1907, he followed with a second patent ( US879532), this time for a sort of grid between filament and plate. It is unclear why he did so; presumably this appeared to work better in his detector circuits. He never used his Audion as an amplification device until about 1912, with results so poor that he hardly believed in it because he sold the patents for all purposes other than wireless for little money to Western Electric.
Western Electric gave it a go for it needed amplification devices for its long-distance telephone lines, although De Forest's Audion was a very weak performer in that area. It was Edwin H. Armstrong, still as a Columbia University student, who realized its potential value. It took him another two years to make it into a usable product [1]. Which in fact makes Armstrong the actual inventor of the triode as a true amplifying device! If he and Western Electric hadn't been there and then, I probably wouldn’t have been writing about the triode here and now.
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U.S. Patent 879,532, published on February 18, 1908, describing the grid-control Audion which would become known as the triode.
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The whole of this development paved the way for something as sublime as Radio. It had been a discouragingly slow process though: 1884, 1896, 1901, 1906, 1907, 1912, 1914. And it eventually also paved the way for audio and hi-fi. But maybe more importantly, this rather sorry story marks the beginning of electronics.
It is not easy to make a clear distinction about when something electrical becomes electronic. For instance, it is not strictly necessary to have an active device in a circuit to characterize that circuit as electronic: everyone will agree that a simple radio receiver consisting of just a coil, a capacitor, a diode, and headphones, all passive components, is electronics. But how about a transformer followed by a diode bridge and an electrolytic capacitor? When it feeds valves and transistors, it would be electronics, right? But when it feeds a DC motor, it can't be more than electricity, or what? I'll leave it to you to try and define what electronics is and what is not. But we'll agree on one thing here: if it happily glows in the dark, it is electronics!
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Lee de Forest (1873 – 1961) holding a small 1 watt receiving tube (left) and a three-element (triode) Audion transmitting power tube.
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References
E. H. Armstrong, “Operating Features of the Audion,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol XXVII, August 1017, pp. 215 – 243.
Wikipedia, Edwin Howard Armstrong
Edwin H. Armstrong - Biography
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About the author
Peter van Willenswaard, is co-founder of Grimm Audio, and the founder and Chief Designer of Audiomagic, specializing in custom tube equipment design, upgrades/modifications, and consulting. Audiomagic repairs and modifies tube audio equipment. As he describes, "By choosing certain types of circuitry and components I try to allow a maximum of emotion, feeling and life to shine through in the resulting apparatus. I do not always fully understand how electronics can do that. Therefore, my motto is: The magic of today is the science of tomorrow.
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Audioscenic: From Vision to Product
By Marcos Simón (Audioscenic CTO and Co-Founder)
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This article is a first-person account of the fascinating journey of British company Audioscenic, an innovative 3D audio beamforming technology company spun off from the University of Southampton. Marcos Simón (Audioscenic CTO and Co-Founder) shares how through a remarkable example of perseverance, Audioscenic realized its forward-thinking approach, from crosstalk cancellation systems to full 3D audio reproduction with speakers. Audioscenic recently achieved its first commercial implementation with the Razer Leviathan V2 Pro gaming soundbar, the first on the market to implement Audioscenic's unique 3D audio beamforming technology. A soundbar that captured 12 "Best of CES" awards, including from audioXpress. This article was originally published in audioXpress, June 2023. Read the Full Article Now Available Here
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B&C Speakers DCX354 High-Powered Coaxial Compression Driver and Horn
By Vance Dickason
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The B&C Speakers DCX354 ring radiator coaxial dual-diaphragm compression driver is a similar design to its big brother, the B&C Speakers DCX464 that was featured in the October 2019 issue of Voice Coil. The DCX354 now makes a total of four coax compression drivers in the B&C Speakers line-up. While B&C Speakers made a significant number of improvements in the new DCX354-16, it is still basically a smaller version of the DCX464. The DCX354 has a 3" midrange diaphragm and a 2" and is good down to 400Hz. The horn tested with the DCX354-16 was the new B&C Speakers ME464, a very large horn device made of durable polyurethane plastic with an 80°×60° nominal coverage pattern. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, May 2023. Read the Full Article Now Available Here
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