Q: This year, your company surveyed engineers on the “future of audio.” What did you find?
A: Probably the most significant
finding was confirmation of an emerging multichannel market that
we’ve been sensing for years. The survey showed that the
percentage of engineers needing audio analyzers with only two channels
is expected to drop from 62% today to about 37% five years from now.
For the same period, the percentage of those who require six channels
or more is expected to rise from 16% to 33%.
Q: What are the biggest changes in audio, and how are they affecting test?
A: Over the last decade,
we’ve seen a progressive increase in digital content in audio
products, and I don’t mean just analog-to-digital converters.
Signal processing has moved almost entirely from the realm of analog
design to digital. Among the benefits are greater versatility and
accuracy, and the implementation of audio features that were
impractical with analog, such as very sharp bends, limiting filters,
and artificial reverberation.
But there’s a dark side, too, in that the
audio contains digital artifacts that we call out-of-band noise. This
energy is well above the audio band, and while it will never get to
your loudspeaker, it can have some very interesting effects on the next
device that you hook it to, as well as to your test instruments. We
need to use very sharp bandwidth-limiting filters to exclude the
effects of this out-of-band noise.
Q: How about the evolution in audio products?
A: Audio devices deliver an
increasing level of functionality, often in very compact packages.
We’re witnessing a fusion of what were once distinctive or
classic products, such as the cell phone. Now, the cell phone is being
merged with a digital camera, and how long will it be before we see the
cell phone merged with an MP3 player? Audio products are growing more
sophisticated, more multipurpose, and more portable. All this
influences the features that engineers will want to test. At the same
time, we see high-end, multichannel audio systems for home theater and
for automotive. It’s not uncommon for cars to have 10-, 12-, or
even 14-channel systems.
Q: How are these developments affecting your instrument offerings?
A: To address this growing multichannel market—from autos to
Dolby 7.1 to traditional mixing consoles—we introduced our APx585. This
analyzer, which comes with easy-to-use PC-based software, features eight analog
audio inputs and eight analog outputs. It also supports eight channels of
digitized audio. This ability to test more than two channels at any one time has
obvious throughput benefits for test engineers and their companies.
Q: Do you see a greater need to serve engineers who don’t have a strong audio background?
A: A very strong
“yes.” Many technical schools are focusing more and more on
digital technology, and less on analog. Many R&D facilities also
are designing consumer products that need to be mass-produced,
typically offshore, by contract manufacturers. In those
locales—China, Southeast Asia, and so forth—you find a wide
variety of backgrounds in production test engineers. Many of them have
not been exposed to some of the specialized parameters that we measure
in audio, such as distortion or signal-to-noise ratio. So, a growing
part of our job is providing the training and support that these
engineers need.
Q: How are you addressing ease-of-use challenges
in testing?
A: Take the APx585, for example. Its control software
was designed from the very beginning to be
internationalized. Every aspect of the user interface
can be converted into a different language. Even so, we
design our equipment to be more robust, so it can
withstand the electrical consequences of someone taking
a signal that should go to the input channel of an
analyzer and accidentally connecting it to the output of
a low impedance generator.
Also, speaking to the ease-of-use question, the
APx585 has a one-click feature that automatically runs a
whole series of tests. This is in line with what we call
the "project concept." Instead of traditional software
where you literally have to deal with multiple panels
and user interfaces just to set up the instrumentation,
the project concept groups together all the files and
all the test setups in one super file on your PC. And
you simply "click and go" to launch a complete sequence
of tests.
Q: Who devises the tests used in this project
concept?
A. Typically, we work with the test engineers
involved in R&D for a device. A common sequence of tests
for a project might include a simple functional test to
detect the signal, a response measurement, distortion,
noise, and then a plethora of other measurements,
depending on the product.
With the project concept, an R&D engineer can simply
copy all the files required for testing a particular
device and transfer that file to another location. This
greatly simplifies test setup. In the past, it could
take days for a contract manufacturer, for example, to
make sure that it had the correct version of all the
test files from R&D.
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