I’m a product person. Which is to say I design and engineer products. It’s easy for people like me to develop a myopic view of the role the product plays in a successful product effort. Sadly (for us), such a view is perilous at best.
The Unstuck Hybrid
Some early thoughts on the subject.
A lot of people are hybrids. There are personality hybrids, perhaps having both introverted and extroverted tendencies. There are cognition hybrids, having both strong analytical and emotional capacities. There are cultural hybrids, who may have become so by spending meaningful parts of their lives in more than one culture. You name it. The list is long.
Some important changes
Prior to this year, I provided technical and design services to Audio by Van Alstine on a consulting basis. This meant that I could freely post thoughts and ideas about audio and design here without a direct conflict of interest. But at the start of this year, I accepted a permanent position at AVA, in part owing to Frank Van Alstine’s semi-retirement, which was announced in September.
This means that thoughts and ideas related to audio I want to share will now be published at a URL under AVA’s ownership: https://mithat.avahifi.com.
I expect to still publish here occasionally, but the content focus will shift. I’m not entirely sure how yet, but it’s very likely I’ll be opening this space up to a wider range of subjects, likely with a more personal feel.
DACs and the Differential Dilemma: a resolution
This is a bit of an overdue followup to my last post, DACs and the Differential Dilemma. I describe here one solution to the standoff between single-ended and differential primacy discussed there.
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DACs and the Differential Dilemma
Most high-performance modern DAC ICs have differential outputs, even those targeting single-ended consumer applications. It’s a great way to reduce even-order nonlinearities in the chip’s conversion and output stages, and it gets you around 3dB better SNR.
But in most systems that support both “balanced” (i.e., differential) and RCA (i.e., single-ended) outputs, there is an existential battle between the two for primacy.
Continue reading “DACs and the Differential Dilemma”Joys of Low-Voltage Audio: Avoiding input stage crossover
In this installment of the Joys of Low Voltage Audio series, I want to present some considerations and techniques to help you work with one of the biggest quirks found in RRIO opamps.
Continue reading “Joys of Low-Voltage Audio: Avoiding input stage crossover”Joys of Low-Voltage Audio: R2R terms and techniques
In the third installment of this series, I want to talk about one of the device types you’re almost guaranteed to encounter in low-voltage audio: the rail-to-rail opamp. More specifically, I want to talk about the terminology around rail-to-rail opamps and the techniques used by IC designers to achieve rail-to-rail behavior. So let’s start by answering a fundamental question.
Continue reading “Joys of Low-Voltage Audio: R2R terms and techniques”Design bind: Can you make the logo bigger?
The scenario: You’ve been hired to do some design work, you’ve submitted the deliverables, and they were accepted. You maybe even got paid. The client later comes back and asks you to change something in a way that you think breaks the design in an unacceptable way. What do you do?
Continue reading “Design bind: Can you make the logo bigger?”More module talk
A few years ago, I developed an audio gain cell that was exceptionally fast for a fully discrete circuit and quite clean. That design ended up being adopted commercially, including by Audio by Van Alstine, who are using it in their DAC MK 5 and Vision preamplifier. I like to think that this gain cell is a key factor behind why the owner of a well-regarded manufacturer of luxury loudspeakers called the AVA DAC MK 5 one of the best sounding DACs he’d ever heard and a model for other manufacturer’s to live up to.
Continue reading “More module talk”Designed to fail: An absence of commitment
I had a discussion recently with someone about a not entirely uncommon situation consultants can find themselves in. You get hired to solve a problem, but the reason they have hired the work out rather than do it internally is because they aren’t really committed to making the project a success. What do you need to know to best deal with this situation?
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