Had a nice chat with Chuck Manzano from Bourns.  He had a beautiful panel of EQ knobs.  I turned when and it rotated all around, without a stop.  Ahhh, an encoder.  What really surprised me is how inexpensive these are getting.  He told me you can go as low as 10 bucks each and with a 64 position quadrature that gives you 256 edges to adjust on.  Pretty cool.

Saw Shawn Scarlett and Ron Knapp from GTronix hanging around the Wolfson booth.  Turns out they bnoth have worked at National Semi like me.  Small world.  Smaller yet, Shawn knows my buddy Martin DeLatuer, international man of mystery.  They really liked my blog about them a while back.  Keep your eyes on this outfit, especially if Martin goes to work for them.

Met William Dull and Jim Mettler from Triad Transformers.  Jim is the engineering manager and knows about magnetics.  He told me that he only uses SPICE as a simple calculator to do turns ratio. When it comes to real magnetics design he has a bunch of formulas in his calculator that can help him get a good design.  I asked about field solvers and such and he said it would take more time to enter the parameters than it was worth.  Bob Pease will be glad to hear of another SPICE skeptic.  Jim said that Triad is bringing back old audio transformers.  People are finally realizing that wires and iron can do amazing things, especially for low noise.  Jim told a story how he did a custom for a major consumer hand tool company and of the 10 companies that submitted designs his was the only one that worked.  Nice to see a gray-beard beating out all those computers with some good old fashioned experience.  Another cool transformer guy was Per Lundahl from Lundahl Transformers.  Very nice stuff from Sweden.

I have to toss a big shout out to Zoran Sekulic, fellow Croatian from NTI.  They make a totally cool set of handheld instruments.Nice folks from Tigard Oregon.

The Freescale gang was there, and nobody looked too worried about the company going private.  Pallab Midya is this really smart guy that will finally be able to make Digital Audio clear to me.  He works form Lake Zurich Illinois.  I have to get out there to see what Freescale is up to in the Midwest.  I had visited their location in Phoenix a couple weeks ago.I also met Sujata Neidig and Brent Karley, two digital audio heavyweights from Austin.  They had real hardware there and is sounded pretty darn good.I think there will be a shakeout in digital audio but I am sure Freescale will still be standing when it is all over.  They were touting their Symphony® FSA95601 digital class-D amp but I suspect anything they do will be pretty cool with that Pallab guy on the payroll.  Oh and I should probably mention the marcom guy-- Brian Beasley-- since he is the guy I am supposed to be talking to.  See what happens when you take technical folks to a trade show—we all find each other and stick together.  Sorry Brian.

Check out the picture—a Cakewalk software jock at the demo booth. Maybe I should give up my Cubase VST.  This guy had a great rap—he is a modern day rock-star. Going from convention to convention to show Cakewalk do its thing.