Net neutrality progress?

PresO seems to be asking the FCC to classify the Internet as a common carrier (ref. http://www.dailydot.com/politics/what-is-title-ii-net-neutrality-fcc/).

Yay!

Now, dear Pres, please back this up with muscle!

One potential loophole: He’s asking the FCC to, “Reclassify the Internet under Title II of … the Telecommunications Act.” He’s not asking them to reclassify them as a common carrier under under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. I don’t know if reclassification under Title II in itself means that it becomes a common carrier or if there is a specific reclassification under Title II that’s required.

Anyone know?

Engineer meets Bugera V22 reverb – Part 1

The Bugera V22 guitar amp is just too good to leave alone. Yes, it’s had its share of teething problems—the worst of which I believe have been sorted. Yes, it’s made in China. Yes the tube quality seems to be a crapshoot. But the build quality is better than what I’d expect at the price, and the sound is unique and just lovely. It’s a great buy.

One thing I’m not super jazzed about though is the amp’s reverb. I begin documenting my gripes below and start off in search of a solution.

Box jointing

box-joints-closeup

I spent the afternoon with the muy talented Jason Holtz learning the inner secrets of box joints. Jason is a master woodworker and furniture designer with clients all over the country. I seriously recommend you check him out if you’re looking for custom or prototype work.

I’ll be turning the above into something more interesting in the upcoming days (i.e., weeks). Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, back in Istanbul …

istanbul-skyline-2014-21

I’ve been in Istanbul for the last week or so. It’s been about a human gestation period since I was last here, and it’s unmistakable that the trend of building more, higher, and brighter has continued unabated.

Pastiche is an approach that’s not uncommon to new-money endeavors, and it’s no surprise that it’s common here. The biggest source of inspiration for the new designs seems to be iconic government projects, large-scale residential structures, and skyscrapers from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, and other European countries whose cities are built on Cartestian street plans.

istanbul-buildings-2014-08The biggest problem with this is that almost nowhere in Istanbul are streets Cartesian. Nor are they radial. Rather, the streets and highways of Istanbul were determined, as one historian put it, by topography. Which is another way of saying that Istanbul’s roads developed in a very ad-hoc fashion. Some think it lends the city some of its charm.

What this means for the increasingly dense structure of new and tall buildings—already a mishmash of pastiche—is that each has a different orientation. You don’t get rows or arcs of buildings; rather you get a hodgepodge of orientations that the hodgepodge of styles simply aren’t suited to. Nothing relates to anything. Little islands of egocentricity and local optimization. An underscoring of the chaos of life in Istanbul.

Whether this will end up increasing the city’s charm remains to be seen.

It develops …

A2

Picking up from earlier, what we’re looking at here is an audio DAC reconstruction filter built around a prototype discrete opamp-like differential gain cell I’ve had in the works for quite a while. I finally chased out the last engineering details and have been listening to the final setup for about a month. I am still astonished at how good it sounds.

I designed the gain cell from the ground-up as a dedicated high-performance audio device. It uses some novel topological and other features that I’ll probably go into in a future post. For now all I want to say that the thing is wicked fast for a discrete device and has been rock-solid stable.

But why bother? Aren’t there already tons of reasonably decent, some even cheap, audio IC opamps out there? Yes, there are. But I’ve never been totally happy with any of them. Some have too much LF bloat, some are too strident—none to my ears do everything right (which is to say, do as little as possible apart from making the signal bigger and stronger).

Designing a discrete device let me optimize the gain structure specifically for audio, minimize and more effectively manage the number of parasitic interactions throughout, thermally couple and, more importantly, decouple elements as necessary, and a few other things. It started as a “Gee, let’s see…” exercise, and I have been rather shocked by the results.

Now I’m contemplating where to take things next. I’ve designed a couple small-footprint packages for the gain cell. I’m implementing a few other ideas with it too. I suspect this surprising little circuit will see some commercial application soon.

Right then. Back to listening. 😀