AES 2006 - Friday on the floor 2

I had a great conversation with Stephen Lampen from Belden.  I hate how the semiconductor guys act like the only difficult or cool thing in engineering is chips.  There is a ton of intellectual property in the cables, as Steve will tell you if you take a half hour to learn just a little of what Belden can do for you. What surprised me is that they will do full-on custom work like Fujikon and they only need volumes of about 5000 feet to make it worth while.  They may even whip out a first article for free if you are a real company and not some hobbyist or dreamer.  Belden is really world-wide and has kept their market share by being better.  Steve told me there are a lot of other cables around that may be cheaper but you bend them once the the impendence goes bad so people have to tear it all out and put in the Belden cable. They have closed-cell foam in the low-loss video cable and you can bend it pretty tight and still have uniform impedance. They are pushing a new line of Brilliance cables.  I asked for two ten-foot samples, which Steve is sending no charge and I will slap them on my network analyzer.  Now I have to warn Steve—the 10-gauge speaker cable I will show that it really does not matter– high frequency response is pretty silly for audio (OK you tweaks, add your comments below).  The Belden stuff does have better jacketing and UL approval which is a big deal—and it is way cheaper than the Monster Cable rip-off stuff.  Maybe if Belden bought the rights to name Candlestick Park Belden Park people would realize they know way more about cable than Monster.

AKM seemed to be sharing a booth with Freescale.  Whatever. I met Randall Hylkema and Chris Baltar a cool young apps engineer.  Randall is working out of a San Jose office.  AKM took a socket from me when I was working at National so I know they can deliver good stuff.  I will tell you more after I visit their San Jose office.

Focal Press was there and they are an Elsevier Company like Reed Elsevier so here a shameless plug.  Nice woman at the booth, I should have asked her to the Bluegrass Festival.

The Wolfson folks where there.  Neil Whyte, an apps engineer like I used to be was there.  We did the secret handshake.  Masons have nothing on apps people.  Jason Coughlan was in form Edinburgh as well as John Crawford.  They were demonstrating some great A to D and DAC stuff as well as codecs.  When you hear other vendors talk about Wolfson quality sound—well you know these guys are into audio.

Texas Instruments had a very nice booth and I got a neat LED pen so I can write in the dark.  The Japnese guy I met did not have any business cards but I got to talk to Dafydd Roche as well, a wild man from Dallas.  He gave me a lot of insight on all kinds of audio facts.  It is his theory that there will be a consolidation in the class-D amplifier manufactures.  He says there are just too many to survive.

One cool outfit I had not heard of was That Coproration.  I had a nice talk with Leslie Tyler the President.  He said they came from the old DBX company in Boston.  The neat thing about That Corporation is they actually went the other way from fables to a fabbed company.  They bought the old Sipex fab out here in Milpitas.  Gary Hebert is a technology hotshot they have that just designed a new chip, the 1646.  One of the best things about That was Bob Moses.  He is on the AES board and was the guy that wanted more hard-core engineering classes.  So he got Henry Ott and Bob Pease.  More on that later.

Best rumor on the floor—Tripath will be bought or out of business in a year.