Jan 30, 2024
This week, we delve into Part Two of our discussion with Michael Goodman of Centrance. We get into the nitty-gritty of the intricacies of creating the PASpport Vo, and the benefits of maintaining simplicity in design by restricting the device to just six knobs, which enhances ease of use for podcasters and voiceovers alike.
#VoiceOverTechTalk #ProAudioSuite #DesignSimplicityInAudio
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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
Hunter S Thompson
Summary
In the latest episode of The Pro Audio Suite podcast, we delve into
Part Two of our insightful discussion with Michael Goodman. The
focus is on the nitty-gritty of audio equipment design,
specifically the intricacies of creating the Passport Vo. Goodman
highlights the benefits of maintaining simplicity in design by
restricting the device to just six knobs, which enhances ease of
use for voiceover artists.
The conversation also explores the challenges and considerations in pricing and product functionality, like the decision to enable the Passport Vo to work with external preamps. Goodman provides a candid look at the rapidly evolving landscape of audio interface protocols, such as the impending obsolescence of the lightning jack in favor of USB-C and the limitations of ASIO on Windows.
Listeners will gain unique insights into the manufacturing process, from the adoption of a platform strategy to the precision of creating 3D printed parts. Goodman discusses the shift to new USB chips due to discontinued ones and reveals how smaller manufacturers are playing a key role.
For those interested in the technical aspects of audio equipment production and design choices that impact both the user experience and future compatibility, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge. Tune in to learn from Goodman's expertise and stay informed on the latest in pro audio equipment design.
#VoiceOverTechTalk #ProAudioSuite #DesignSimplicityInAudio
Timestamps
(00:00:00) Introduction with George Wittam and Robert Marshall
(00:00:32) George Discusses Design Limitations
(00:05:22) Unique Tools for Voiceover Artists
(00:08:44) Flexibility of the English Channel Passport
(00:11:56) Apple's Lightning Jack Obsolescence
(00:16:23) Challenges with Apple's Developer System
(00:21:36) Michael on the Passport VO Analog Mixer
(00:25:04) Progress on USB Chip Prototyping
(00:28:48) DIY Circuit Board Manufacturing
(00:33:15) Handling Tiny Components on Circuit Boards
(00:35:48) Michael Inquires About Custom Faceplates
(00:38:27) Closing Remarks and Acknowledgments
Transcript
Speaker A: Y'all ready?
Speaker B: Be history.
Speaker A: Get started.
Speaker C: Welcome.
: Hi. Hi.
Speaker A: Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. These guys are
professional.
Speaker C: They're motivated with tech. To the Vo stars, George
Wittam, founder of source elements Robert Marshall, international
audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson, and global voice Andrew
Peters. Thanks to Triboo, austrian audio making passion heard
source elements George the tech Wittam and Robbo and AP's
international demo. To find out more about us, check ThePro
audiosuite.com. And this is part two of our talk with Michael
Goodman. In this episode, we pick up where we left off and we talk
about the passport Vo.
Speaker A: I like the fact that there's a restriction to the
design. Like, Michael had to decide what those six knobs could do
or not do. And so it wasn't like, oh, let's just add more knobs.
Let's just make it bigger.
: I did add more knobs in the black cab. It's got nine.
Speaker A: Just kind of pushing squeeze nine in there. Yeah, but
no, that's the beauty of when we made the passport. We did not add
more knobs. We forced ourselves to work within that restricted
design space and say, we have six knobs. We need to do everything
we need with these six knobs. If there's more than six knobs, how
do you expect an actor to understand what the heck the thing is
doing as you add more and more?
Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
: See, we should have looked at the black cab when we were asking
for stuff.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: I have a funny feeling Michael's answer would have been
the same.
: I think it's an excellent way of building simplicity into it, and
really also, it makes you go through the design process. And I
think it was a fun thing with the passport was exactly that.
Because at first it was like, so many things. Add another knob, add
another knob, and then you have to go through that slightly painful
but sharpening process of going, like, we can't only have six
knobs. How are you really going to do this?
: It's interesting. When I was younger, I geeked out a lot on the
japanese culture specifically. I loved their propensity for making
small pieces of art. Right. The whole idea with the ice sculpture,
art should be ephemeral. It should be there, and it's not there
anymore. Right. And then the whole idea with writing a poem on a
grain of rice, et cetera. I love compact things. And when we
started making hi fi products, we also make some headphone
listening products at sentrance. I traveled to Japan a lot, and I
attended these hi fi shows, and I noticed how people are focused on
completely different priorities there. Because apartments are very
small in Japan. And therefore nobody buys a traditional stereo
system with big speakers and all that. Everybody essentially
listens in headphones in a tiny little spot, usually on a train, on
their way to work or back home. So that culture creates a necessity
for smaller things. And then for some reason, it just kind of stuck
with me. I like when, essentially, when you travel, you don't want
to log around a 19 inch rack or even like a 500 series lunchbox
thing. That's the way we're trying to make these things small. But
getting back to passport vo, the restriction there was basically
the same one that was popularized by Henry Ford, who said that you
can have your Model T in any color as long as it's black. Yeah. So
basically, we have this box, and whatever you want to have must
fit.
Speaker C: In the box, which was good. And it was an interesting
exercise, me being the guinea pig who potentially is going to be
the person who uses this. Know, I didn't want it too technical and
trying to get the terminology something that people like me would
understand. So that was an interesting exercise for all of us as
well.
Speaker A: There was a lot of pushing and pulling between the
Andrew Robert hemispheres of the design team.
: There was?
Speaker C: Yes, that's right.
: Yes. I was wanting to keep it flexible and let it do more things.
Be both. The. For instance, I wanted to be the interface that you
could take on the road or leave in your control room and run it as
your whole studio interface, or have it in your booth. And it could
work in any place. And Andrew was like, I just want to travel with
this was.
Speaker C: It was kind of interesting because we were the polar
opposite. So you had Robert on one side, me on the other side, and
George and Robbo in the middle. George particularly, trying to make
sense of.
Speaker A: Our nonsensical and the filter. And I was trying to
condense down everything. What they wanted to George was the
traffic Michael. So that Michael didn't end up having to be the
traffic cop. It got out of control at one point, expand at one
point. Remember distinctly, I was like, wait, I was supposed to be
protecting my.
: I think that was important, giving Michael one point of
communication. Because it would have been maddening for him.
: Exactly. Well, I have to say, I actually enjoyed the process. I
mean, there was a lot of creativity and ideation throughout the
whole thing. And if you have. I love ideation myself. So I'm not
really necessarily against it, opposed to it, as long as it
eventually comes to a solid, well defined feature. Set, which I
think we have. So that whole process that worked very well for me.
And I do appreciate George coming in as a traffic cop and
essentially directing.
Speaker B: A lot of that traffic and an architect as well. Can I
just say, with all the drawings that he had to do, I.
Speaker A: Had fun trying to figure out a way to draw a signal flow
diagram, which I'd never really done anything. And I know there's
proper nomenclature and symbolism and all sorts of stuff in drawing
one. I didn't know that, so I just did my own thing. But it really
was cool because it helped me tremendously see it, understand what
goes to what. And we revised that signal flow diagram. Oh, jeez, I
don't know, seven or eight times, probably.
Speaker C: Yeah, probably a lot more.
Speaker B: A million times.
: I think it was the blend of having the signal flow diagram so you
could really see what was exactly going to happen combined with the
mockup of the final device so you could get an imagination of how
it was really going to work in the field. I think we really came up
with something that fits sentrins in the sense that it fits,
obviously, the form factor, but it's super flexible and unique.
You're not finding this absolutely any other interface.
: No, I think it'll continue to be unique because it is so purpose
built that other manufacturers will look at it and go, why?
Speaker C: That's right, exactly.
Speaker B: Because there's nothing else out there that's been
purpose built for voiceover artists. I think that was the initial
motivation. For years, voiceover artists have had to take stuff
that's built for music, for music engineers, and rework it to make
it for voiceover.
: And it seems like this is such a niche industry that a larger
manufacturer might not necessarily see a lot of business potential
there. So I think that was a good match between our size being a
smaller company and then a market being smaller that we were like,
okay, that makes sense.
: I think you see that in its price point.
Speaker C: Yeah.
: Someone who's looking at it really basically goes, I can get a
two channel USB interface, two microphones USB interface for
$100.
: No, this is not that.
: If you see that in there, then you're not seeing what this
is.
Speaker A: Yeah, it's not for you. There's almost like when you set
something at a price point, you're trying to give a very clear, I
mean, not only you're saying that it's worth it, obviously, but
you're making a very clear statement that this is priced for
professionals and it's worth every penny to a professional who will
understand the value. And we've already had people stand up and
say, I believe it. I see what you're saying. And they've blunt down
the cash.
: And let's be honest, for a working voiceover professional, not
everybody, of course, but a lot of those guys can make that much
money in 15 seconds.
: Pays for itself in one gig.
Speaker A: That is true.
Speaker C: Exactly.
Speaker A: We knew that pricing was going to be tricky, but we also
knew that we had a restricted space in which we had to work. We
wanted the value to be there. But we also have to make a profit.
Michael has to make a profit. We had ideas that would have driven
the price even higher quite a bit that we could have implemented,
but we didn't want to do that. There's a certain point where we
thought, let's keep it under that.
: Well, I remember one was how we handled the, and this is actually
something I have a question with, with the English Channel, we
wanted to make the passport flexible enough to use an external
preamp instead of the built in one. And I know that was important
to Andrew. And one of the things I find with the English Channel is
that when you come out line level XLR and you go into the
courtcaster, turning the courtcaster down is not enough. You got to
pad the other stages beforehand to get it because you're kind of
feeding a mic pre into a mic pre. And I remember that was one of
the things where we had to accept that we were going to go through
that chip, if I remember right, and we didn't get a pure bypass
of.
Speaker A: The mic because that was going to raise the parts count
and the cost in other ways. And it was such a, the switching, it
was something where it was going to add cost to make a very small
percentage of users.
: It would not have made a difference to most users.
Speaker C: But even based on that, I have to say that if you look
at the new Neumann interface, how much is that thing?
: Like one, $200, right?
Speaker C: No, more than that. It will be like over 2000 us.
: 18, from what I understand.
: 18, yeah. I'm sorry. And it doesn't do as much as the.
Speaker C: And also when you're talking about having, bypassing the
internal preamp, it doesn't.
: Oh, really?
Speaker C: It doesn't. Like, nowhere on that new Neumann interface
can you bypass a preamp.
Speaker A: Fascinating.
: I would wonder if that's a subject of pride. We give you the best
preamp in the land. Why would you want to bypass that?
Speaker B: I would suggest that would be the case, yeah.
Speaker A: Well, the irony is that they sell a preamp like they
sell a very expensive preamp. Outboard preamp. So you would think
that they would have that.
: Do you want to know what device that is? It's the reincarnation,
it's the perennial. It's like a locust that comes out of the ground
every eight years. And the last one that emerged out of the ground
was the mini me.
Speaker A: The mini me from Apigee.
: The apigee mini me. Yeah. Badass preamp. Badass converter.
Speaker A: Yeah. And soft clipping.
: It had that limiter but really expensive interface that's just
going to. I'm expensive. I'm going to be the best kind of thing is
what it's trying to be, but it's not flexible.
: Mini me is not a convincing name.
Speaker A: If that movie hadn't come, I'm sure.
: When that movie came true, but really, the mini me, it wants to
be the original ad 1000, which I have several of those. And those
are great.
: Yeah.
Speaker A: But they don't use Firewire or USB. Right.
: The mini me, I believe, is USB.
Speaker A: Are you sure? I don't think so.
: I'm pretty sure it runs as USB and a separate pre, but I
don't.
Speaker A: Think it has any protocol. See, that's the thing. As
soon as you add a protocol to the unit, like a USB protocol, a
firewall protocol, you're now dating your product. It is now locked
in time. It's now going to be obsolete at some point.
Speaker C: Correct.
Speaker A: Like this happened. Firewire. Actually, Firewire just
became officially obsolete with, I think, Ventura, if you have a
Firewire device.
: So even if you have like a firewired, a thunderbolt adapter, it
doesn't matter.
Speaker A: They dropped off the protocol. It's gone. Poof.
: Well, the lightning jack is about to go the way of the dodo.
Speaker A: Yes, that's right.
: Really?
: Because of Europe.
Speaker A: That's a whole other can of worms. Right, Michael?
Because I know you spent a long time dealing with the lightning
port and the. What is it called? Made for Apple MFA?
: Mfi. Mfi. Made for iPhone.
Speaker A: Right. Made for iPhone. And wasn't that like a major
stumbling block to getting the first mixer face built and
designed?
: Correct. We started down that path in our hi fi devices because
we wanted to make these headphone amplifiers that plugged into the
phone because a lot of people started moving their music collection
onto the phone and using the phone as the playback device. And then
that kind of translated into recording products as well. So Apple
decided to keep that walled garden ecosystem all to themselves. And
then as a manufacturer, making a peripheral device, a product that
would interface with the Apple iPhone, iPad, et cetera. You had to
go through a lengthy bureaucratic process to establish yourself as
a registered developer, essentially in the MFI ecosystem. And they
policed that hard to the point. I mean, it got ridiculous. So the
lightning jack actually is quite sophisticated. There's a chip
inside and that chip has a serial number, a laser etched serial
number inside. So every lightning jack in the world has a unique
serial number. Believe it or not, this information is less relevant
now. But it used to be relevant before. So what had happened is if
there was a cable, a lightning cable, lightning to USB, that was
not made per spec, any cable that you made as an MFI manufacturer
had to be certified by an Apple approved lab and it had to do all
the things that a lightning cable had to do.
: It was very annoying when they started.
: They enforced it all the time. And then what they ended up doing
is there's been a plethora of chinese cables that were not
approved. So Apple was able, because they actually had control over
the chips inside of the lightning checks, they were able to
remotely disable cables.
Speaker A: Wow.
: And then we still get these calls. It's like, man, I plug this
lightning to USB cable into your product and it doesn't pass audio.
It's your product. No, it's the cable. That cable just hasn't paid
the fee. And by the way, you had to pay the fee to Apple. If you
were MFI developer, the manufacturer of that cable either didn't
pass the test or didn't pay the fee or whatever and their cable had
been remotely disabled, which is bizarre. But that went on for a
while and after a while we were know we're too small to be able to
deal with this because there were like constant updates.
: So then you just have to get your own interface adapter so you
couldn't plug straight into the phone anymore. You had to have some
stupid dongle so Apple could get their fee.
: They got their fee one way or another. But now, thanks to Europe,
it's just going to be USBC and the whole lightning adapter is no
more.
Speaker A: Oh, so let me ask you, this is the MFI certification,
whatever you want to call it. Is that now dead because of USBC or
is it still in there somewhere?
: There is no special communication happening anymore because USBC
is supposed to be generic. You had to announce yourself and you had
to be in the database and that's how they tracked you essentially.
But now there is no communication there. And then, so now it's just
like a Windows machine. You plug a peripheral, a USB peripheral
into a Windows machine. And if it's a generic peripheral, it pulls
up a generic driver and knows what to do, knows how to work with
it. With Mac, it's been like that forever. And they've written
great drivers, a lot better than Windows. So that any audio
interface, you plug it into a Mac, it works right away.
Speaker A: Yeah, as long as it's core. What do they call it?
Compliant or core audio compliant?
: Core audio. Core. Audio compliant, right, exactly.
: And then. So it's going to be exactly like that with the iPhone
and iPads. Been like that with the iPad for about a year now. So
just one less hurdle to jump over, which that's progress. Yes. And
that's good, because we had this conversation the other day when
you were coaching me on how to make the proper connections here,
and I was pulling my hair out, trying to get things working, and I
realized that it works in this environment, not in that environment
and all that.
Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Honestly, when I was writing that, I went
down the rabbit on the developer page of Apple. Right. To
understand better how the system works. And there was like seven
distinctly different and unique modes of operation.
: Because it's trying to make all these decisions for you. It's
like, can we interrupt this phone call? Can we interrupt this
movie?
Speaker A: Right, right. Oh, my gosh, it is so complicated.
: It is pretty annoying.
Speaker A: It's all complicated on the developer side so that you,
the user, don't have to think about it, but they make those
decisions for you. And that's what runs us into trouble as pros. I
wish, again, because of iPhone 15 Pro and the new chipset, maybe
this is going to change. But yeah, I wish we could really control
our devices and say, I want to use this as the input. I want to use
that as the output. I want to send this over here.
: On the Windows side, there is this protocol that's been around
for a while called ASIO. ASIO is the one that is direct to device.
It was developed that way a long time ago.
: It was made by Steinberg.
: Yeah. And that would not be interrupted if you're playing a
YouTube video or phone call comes in. Your session continues to be
solid. Nowadays.
: The problem with ASIO is that it can't share very well.
: The whole point of it is that you shouldn't share. It should be
like point to point, indestructible. You know what I mean?
: On the macOS, it's got it with core audio where it shares it just
fluidly yet. And the only thing that you have to make sure of which
is the same with any situation is you just keep. If I'm sharing it,
we have to agree on what sample rate we're going to be at. The
device can't be at more than.
Speaker A: One sample rate, but there's still weird stuff on the
Apple side. Where is the volume up and down button on the keyboard
going to change the output level of my device?
: Exactly.
Speaker A: I don't know. Is the gain, input gain setting on Mac OS
going to be effective on the input level?
: Or would that be if that device is set as the output in system
preferences, then your knob becomes a control if that device is
controllable. Not all devices are controllable. And you'll see that
some of them, if you select them as the output, the slider becomes
grayed out.
Speaker A: But who decides that? The manufacturer of the device,
the writer of the driver or the Mac audio.
: Stack or whatever, that's the device.
: In reality, it's everything. It's a little bit of both. So some
decisions Apple has to make, some decision manufacturer tries to
make, but then Apple could reverse those decisions at their own
volition. Anytime you have a competition between a whole bunch of
sound sources, like phone movie playing, another movie playing in
this other window, and then your audio thing, the system has to
decide what's the priority, which of these programs really has to
be streamed and which other ones have to be muted, or do you want
to just mix everything together? Which is kind of madness,
right?
Speaker A: Yeah. IPhone does some weird stuff like, I know we're
going down a rabbit hole.
: It's very useful. It's like the way a Nexus device works. They're
like patch cables. And if you send two devices to go out the same
patch cable, it just mixes everything together. The Wasopi Windows
driver is a little bit more flexible and a little bit more core
audio like than mixes.
: It mixes everything, and they worked hard on doing that. Here's a
problem, because it has to mix so many different streams, again,
from these movies and radio stations and everything else that you
could be listening to and watching at the same time in the same
Windows computer. What they do is they have to align the sample
rates from all these different sources. The process of aligning the
sample rates results in a delay in latency. So that's completely
inapplicable to music recording. Robbie would know about that. And
then, so if you're watching a movie and the sound comes in 30
milliseconds later, you don't know it. It doesn't matter if you're
recording music and sound comes back 30 milliseconds later, it
ruins the take.
: So I wonder if the latency in Wasapi is similar to the latency in
core audio. Because anything that's native, every audio engineer
knows it's more.
: It's a lot more. In Wasapi, core audio is just very well
tuned.
: It's like Wasapi and fast. It's like Wasapi and ASIO combined in
a way.
: Wasapi generally introduces delay, and it introduces a lot of
convenience at the price of the delay, whereas ASIO is as little
delay as you can have. So essentially, the delay through the
computer is about two milliseconds each way, and then the rest of
it is the interface. But it's point to point. There are no
decisions to make, so there's no pausing to think whether we should
do it this way or that way. That's the beauty of ASIO, and core
audio is very much like that.
Speaker A: Since we're talking about Windows a little bit, is it
too early for you to tell us, Michael, when you connect the
passport Vo with its two USB buses or two USB interfaces to a pc,
is the best choice for the user, in most cases going to be, what do
they call it? Mme or Windows classic wave driver or direct sound.
What's going to be the optimal setting? Do you think?
: Wasapi usually is the best if you know what you're doing and
you're not sending several different streams into your
interface?
Speaker A: Right, right. And you won't be, because with this
design, each USB bus is basically a simple two in, two out. Exactly
interface. Right. So the hardware, all that mixing that we try to
do with software, and sometimes not very successfully, is being
handled in the analog domain or internally inside the unit.
: Right.
Speaker A: So we don't have to even worry about that anymore.
: That was a very smart idea or path.
: That's the beauty of it. No drivers? No, yes. Nothing to. That's
the goal.
: Yeah. You could have two separate applications running at the
same time. One could be sharing applications such as source
connect. The other one can be a recording application such as DAW,
local DAW.
Speaker A: And then Adobe audition is a popular choice on
Windows.
: Those applications could actually meet inside of the device,
inside of passport Vo, and not really conflict with each other as
they would be if you were trying to mix inside the machine.
: This is why we did it, because on Windows, this ability to have
two applications use the same device at the same time can cause
huge tech support issues. Huge. And one approach is to basically
have someone like George help you out and figure it out. Going into
drivers and turning them off of exclusive mode and things like
that. And then crossing your fingers that it works.
Speaker A: No, I have. Mike McConaughey will do that. I won't touch
that stuff anymore on Windows.
: Or just do it this way and dedicate one interface to one
application, the other interface to the other, and then do all your
cross patching and your blending and the analog domain with.
: That's unique. Nobody else does that, right.
Speaker A: And that internally. Michael, just to make that really
clear, it's an analog signal path, that's all. It's staying
completely analog?
: Yes. It's an analog mixer which has two inputs which happen to be
digital streams from the computer.
Speaker A: But they've been converted from digital to.
: Analog to analog and become analog. Mixing in analog introduces
zero latency. It's that old technology. We're going back to the
british invasion. And it's seamless, essentially. There are no
conflicts when you're mixing an analog.
Speaker A: Yeah, no sample rates to coordinate.
: George? It's a bit like when you use the Bering interface to plug
externally back.
Speaker A: Into someone else's problem solver.
: It's that, but it's all in the box with knobs and switches to
control it. Instead of like, you could have your.
Speaker A: Doll running at 24, 96, maybe 24 bit 96. And you can
have your zoom or source connect running at whatever the heck the
client wants, sample rate it needs to be. And they will not step on
each other's toes at all. You don't have to worry about that.
: Yeah, that's completely transparent in the analog domain. So I
think that was a brilliant move.
Speaker A: I can't wait. That's such a cool thing.
: Hey, listen, I can't wait either. So a small development on that
front. I know everybody wants to know status. As mentioned before,
we have three separate paths here. And we're about to choose one
with regards to the actual USB chip. So I've laid out all of the
analog circuitry. It's already done. So all that mixing that we've
just talked about, that's all already in the design.
Speaker A: Cool.
: It's designed and it's waiting to be prototyped. I am pausing and
not sending this to prototyping because there's one additional
block that needs to be finalized. And that block is the USB portion
of the design. Actually, there's two USB portions of the design
because, as we just said, there's two USB ports and there's two
different computers that you could connect this thing to at the
same time. And then it would then blend between the signals from
those two computers. So for the USB chip that goes inside of there,
the two USB chips, we learned recently, unfortunately, that the
chip that we've been using for like twelve years or so is now out
of production. And the manufacturer does have a newer version, but
it's larger and more expensive. But larger part is more important
here because, yes, we do have that small box and it just wouldn't
fit. So we started a big search for another chip. We found a
manufacturer in Taiwan, which is a smaller manufacturer, and it
makes a chip that is smaller also. And that seems to fit the bill.
But we wanted to make sure that we kind of wanted to vet them.
Speaker A: Yeah, you don't just slap any random chip in there and
hope for the.
: You know, it's like a couple of guys in an office. Are you going
to be around next year? So I have a friend in Taiwan who visited
them yesterday and sent me a lengthy email. Anyway, so he visited
them. He lives in neighboring cities. It's an hour drive for him,
not that big a deal. So he popped over and he had a meeting and he
said it was a very pleasant conversation. Taiwan is where they make
all of the chips pretty much in the world these days. So they use a
couple of foundries. Foundries. A plant that makes chips. And then,
so they use two very reputable suppliers for that. And everything
is well tested. I was like, do they test these things? How's the
reliability? Do they have any large customers? Turns out this
company is not well known in America, in the west yet, but they are
known in China, and they're shipping significant volume into China.
So I think there's the reason to believe that it's going to be a
reliable supplier. And so my friend there in Taiwan who actually
works for large contract manufacturers, like, yeah, you should go
ahead and work with them. Not a problem. I don't see a problem.
Speaker A: Milestone moment right here, folks.
: Just happened to yesterday, as a matter of fact. So we're like,
oh, okay, well, then, thank you. So we're not concerned about their
longevity and all that. So there was also a third path, which was
there's still a stock available of the old chip that's gone out of
production and we can put that in there. But that would just kind
of be a step backwards, putting something in the product that you
know is not going to be made anymore.
: Are there any features on the new chip? Like, it goes up to
384.
: It does.
: Does your taxes.
: It does do your taxes. That would be important. But the 384, I
think less so I'm joking, of course, because who needs 384 in real
life? Audiophiles love their 384. Except there's no content to
play. But you got to buy your DAC.
: It's the album of mouse farts.
: To each his own.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker A: One other thing I want to touch on before we wrap it is
I also know that you have invested in a rapid prototype, or what
would you call it, a prototyping.
: You can make your own boards now.
: Right? It's a pick and place machine. That's the official
name.
Speaker A: Pick and place. Got you.
: Yeah. Electronic components these days don't go through little
holes in the side of the pc board. Instead, they're planar. Yeah.
They're just put on the surface. And some of these components are
smaller than 1 mm by 1 mm. They're really tiny.
Speaker A: Yeah.
: And then it used to be ten years ago that they're larger. Maybe
three, four, 5 can actually use tweezers and just put them on the
board yourself. It'd take forever, but you could do it right. And
then you'd put this whole board with all these components that you
just very carefully put on the board, and you would put it inside
of an oven and heat it up for about ten minutes. There'd be a
particular heat profile, and that would solidify all of the solder
and then connect all the components together. And after you had a
board for prototyping, that was a thing to do. Nowadays, components
are so small that even if you have a magnifying glass, if you
partied the night before, your hand is not as steady anymore. So
therefore, assembling these things. And I'm not saying that people
should not party, but it kind of puts a cramping your style anyway.
So this automated pick and place machine that we have now does that
for you. It's a robot, and it just kind of like, has a tiny little
suction cup at the end of a needle. So it just moves over the hand,
moves over to where you have your components on a reel. They're in
a bobbin. This is reel. And it just picks one up by applying a
little bit of suction, kind of sucks it out of the reel and then
moves it to an appropriate place on the board and just kind of
releases gently. And it can handle things that a human hand cannot
handle. So from that standpoint, it's a huge benefit. And it
actually does it fast, and it doesn't party the night before, from
what I know, it doesn't ask for.
: Raises and it doesn't.
: Yeah.
Speaker A: So I have so many questions. I mean, I'm dying to see
one of these working in action. I'm sure I could probably find it
on YouTube. But how long does it take to populate a board that
would go inside the mixer face or pork?
: About ten minutes at this point.
Speaker A: Wow.
: Whereas if you do it by hand, you're probably, like, at it for a
couple of hours.
Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
: And you're developing cramps.
: When does it get to the point where it's like, just by order?
When does it get to the point where you can make your board, you
can assemble your board, you've got a 3d printer. Because I really
like the case for the english channel. A lot of manufacturing is
like, okay, we're going to make a product, and then there you have
60,000 of some plastic thing, and then maybe they sell, maybe they
don't, and you just have a lot of extra waste and they're done.
Here's like making these things as needed, right?
: 3D printing. Yeah, we make everything for order, and we've been
sheepish about it for a while until we got to the point where we
figured out how to make it look good and also make it reliable so
it doesn't break. So these 3D printed parts at this point are
completely usable. I mean, they're not toys anymore. They're
functional pieces of mechanical design. And we love that because we
can change colors. You can get the tray, the commander console, we
call it, for the english channel. You can get it in lime, lemon,
red, blue, white, black, whatever, gray. And this is so easy for us
to do otherwise we would have to order thousands of each color and
then store them somewhere. And now we just have these reels of
filament, which is this just essentially plastic out of which
everything's being made, and then we can make them to order. So
that's really great. And then as far as how long does it take?
Well, the box that we make everything in is still aluminum. So that
box, fortunately for us, we make a lot of different products inside
that same box. So we can order it by a boatload from the
manufacturer because there is a minimum order quantity. But we
figured that we will go through the entire order because we will
put different products in that same box, and that way we can afford
to buy a whole bunch at once.
Speaker A: So one more board thing is amazing. So after you've
dropped tiny, tiny little components over this little board, so is
that the point where it goes into the oven? And how do you keep the
little tiny, tiny, tiny pieces from moving around.
: You squeeze paste, solder, solder paste, the official name. You
squeeze a layer of this gooey. It's just like toothpaste, but it's
dark gray. And it has the property that when you heat it up, it
solidifies and it becomes metal. But basically you get a stencil,
which is this thin metal plate. Steel plate, very thin, less than a
millimeter. And then holes for the components are laser cut inside
of that steel plate. And then you put that steel plate over the
board, line it up correctly, and then you use a squeegee to
essentially squeeze that paste over the stencil. And then where the
stencil has the holes, the paste drops through the holes onto the
pc board and then forms the tiny little squares in appropriate
places. Then they're a little sticky, just like toothpaste. And
then when a component drops onto these two squares, for example, if
component has two pins, right, it kind of gets stuck in the paste
and it doesn't move. And then you can handle the board. I mean, you
don't want to throw the board because the components will fly off.
But if you carefully handle it and carefully move it into the oven,
then the components will not move. And then what actually happens
in the oven is a beautiful thing due to surface tension.
Essentially, the components, once they heat up, they line up
because the tiny little solder bolts. So essentially you have
liquid metal at that point. If you remember the movie terminator,
there was this other terminator guy that was essentially made out
of liquid metal, and he could reassemble himself at all points.
Remember that?
Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
: T two. Yeah, that's liquid tension is like when liquid gets
together, it just kind of just forms this one thing wants to make a
ball. Wants to make a ball. And that is what allows these tiny
little components to get soldered to the pads in a very even sort
of glowing pattern where all the solder gets utilized and none of
it is left around because it all kind of tenses up and kind of
sucks into one bowl in each little pad.
Speaker A: That's cool, man. Thanks for describing that. That's
really neat.
: Michael, I actually had one quick question with the faces. Can
you cut your own faces right now?
: When you say faces, what are you referring to?
: Like, all your pieces are made out of the same metal, sort of two
pieces of metal.
: Oh, I understand.
: And right now, they always have the same four outside screw holes
to hold them together. But then on the top of it, there's different
holes for different knobs. And what I'm asking is, do you need to
make seven holes in this one, three slots for a different switch.
And you're able to do that all at your place now. I mean, could you
theoretically just.
: No, we still do it at a supplier, but. Good question. Yes. So the
official term for this is platform strategy, is when you can make a
lot of different things out of one thing. Another official term, if
you want to keep going with the MBA speak. Design for postponement
is what we're using here, if you want to be official about it,
which means that you can make the decision on what the heck it is
that you're building at the very last step. Right. Which also
allows 3d printing is the same thing. You postpone the
differentiation of the product, and then you can actually choose
what you're building the day when you ship that thing. Right.
Toyota has pioneered that in the 80s where with the whole just in
time strategy and all that, because they were able to reduce the
amount of stuff that they held at their warehouses, which were huge
anyway. So what happens with these products is, on top of the
product is this plastic overlay. It's actually a sticky sticker.
Yeah, it's a thick sticker made out of polycarbonate. It's a
polycarbonate overlay with an adhesive backing that we very
carefully lay in this existing hole. And then that sticker we
print. And then, fortunately, we have a supplier who doesn't want
us to print thousands of them. They can print 100 at a time. And
then those stickers themselves are not that expensive. And
therefore we can get 100 stickers of each product and then
essentially put the sticker on the product. The day we assemble the
product and the day we ship it to the customer, which allows us to
be a lot more flexible than a traditional manufacturing plant.
: So then if you have the ability to drill your own holes and slots
at some point, whatever CNC machine that.
: Is, we have that.
Speaker B: There you go.
Speaker C: You do.
: I haven't let you into the warehouse yet. You should come
back.
: I'd love to.
Speaker C: Yeah, he's on his way.
Speaker B: He's leaving now.
: And on that note, as Andrew would say, yes.
Speaker A: Well, that was fun.
: Is it over?
Speaker C: The pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and austrian
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