I was viewing an instructional video on developing guitar soloing techniques, and was struck by the parallels to audio design. In both pursuits, there’s a danger of trying to impress instead of focusing on fundamentals.
Tag: product development
Behind the scenes
Development of the Wind River Speaker Cables
We sold a customer some late stage prototype, Wind River speaker cables. He loved them, and asked us about our design approach and how we arrived at our current production cables. So here you go … 15 months’ development summarized in a few paragraphs.
Mk 1.5 Turntables and Dual Tonearms
The Mk II turntable series represented a shift from pivoting (rotating) armboards to sliding armboards. After the production launch, we looked into the possibility of this sliding armboard architecture trickling down to our Mark I series turntables The result was the Mk 1.5 conversion. The only downside to this conversion is the sacrifice of dual …
Drive Systems – A Historical Timeline
With the release of our Spring, 2019 drive system update, it seemed like a good time to trace the evolution of our motor drives. We’ve included some details for the technically inclined, and we’ve tried to give you some insight into both our developent process and what we were trying to acccomplish. The sonic attributes …
Gavia/Stelvio Controller Upgrade
Development of one product frequently informs development of another. In the case of the NiWatt amplifiers, we needed better wire and suddenly, a new line of cables was born. During development of the Eiger rim drive turntable, our biggest challenge was reducing noise transmission from the motor, since it’s directly coupled to the chassis as …
Interconnect Prototypes
I was going through my notes on the final round of cable prototypes. This was the group of cables that pointed toward the production cable, and I invited Lynn Olson over for a listen. Since Lynn has been an advocate of cotton for longer than I, I knew he’d welcome the opportunity for a comparison.
Development of the NiWatt – Part 3
It dawns on me that we haven’t had any NiWatt updates in a while, and as we near production, it’s time to bring you up to date (stay tuned for news). I went through photos taken at various stages of prototyping and have a bit more of the story to tell.
Platter Conversion Time
The last of the Summer updates – adapting a first generation Gavia platter to TPI© / Carbon.
Karna Meets NiWatt
Many of you know that Lynn Olson’s Karna amplifiers inspired several key design elements in the NiWatt amplifiers. Last week, Lynn and I applied a few tricks to the Karnas which were learned during the NiWatt’s development, and Lynn let the Karnas extend their visit for a few more days (Lynn likes to call them …
Development of the NiWatt – Part 2
The first post in this series developed into a design manifesto – a retrospective on everything I’ve learned both as a designer and music lover. Never lacking something to say, it quickly became apparent that this would be a multi-part series. In this post, I’m going to cover my breadboarding approach: selecting the basic architecture, …
