Fresh From the Bench: QuantAsylum QA401 and QA451 Compact and Modular Audio Measurement System

On the cover of audioXpress December 2020, many of our readers instantly recognized the familiar look of the increasingly popular QuantAsylum QA401 audio analyzer. What many readers didn't recognize by then was the second module, the completely new QA451 programmable load, so new that audioXpress tested a pre-production version. In this review article, David Logvin shares his valuable perspective on this modular solution for audio measurements from QuantAsylum.

In this article, Mike Harkins reviews the versatile Puffin Phono DSP by Parks Audio. For those of you who are not familiar with Parks Audio, this company was founded by Shannon Parks, who has also contributed fantastic articles published by audioXpress. After experimenting with several other products, Parks Audio has achieved notoriety for its phono stage Puffin, which adds a programmable DSP and is able to be updated and improved constantly with simple firmware updates. A new approach that truly takes the concept of a phono stage to a different level. This article was originally published in audioXpress, December 2020.

This article for Voice Coil magazine offers a valuable perspective about one of the most promising manufacturing opportunities in Asia. While there has been speaker parts manufacturing and speaker assembly for more than 20 years in Vietnam, the recent influx of speaker and audio OEM/ODMs that are expanding satellite factories through the country was motivated particularly by companies looking to counter the trading tariffs imposed in the United States. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, September 2020.

James Croft reviews a patent claimed by Polk Audio and granted in 2015, describing “a single-enclosure loudspeaker system that projects multichannel surround sound into a listener’s room, and so replaces multiple conventional surround channel loudspeakers.” The patent also describes, in one embodiment of the invention, that the “surround channel program material is pre-processed by an integrated wireless transmission device that performs certain digital signal processing and channel mixing steps in advance of wireless surround signal broadcast to a receiver.” This article was originally published in Voice Coil, January 2015.

Every month on his Voice Coil's Acoustic Patents column, James Croft (Croft Acoustical) discusses different loudspeaker patents and inventions that are relevant to the audio industry. In the January 2015 edition. Croft reviewed a “Loudspeaker for Eliminating a Frequency Response Dip” patent, granted in November 12, 2014 to Harman International Industries, describing “a speaker system that includes a speaker enclosure having a front end, a rear end, and a first transducer. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, January 2015.

In this review, Stuart Yaniger details his findings about the M23R Earthworks measurement microphone. The M23R is the latest omnidirectional model in Earthworks’ infinitely matched series of measurement microphones. It is designed to be an affordable reference solution, delivering an IEC 61672 Class 1 frequency response before applying any equalization. This article was originally published in audioXpress, November 2020.

audioXpress is proud to publish a contributed article by Manfred Lutzky, Head of Audio for Communications at Fraunhofer IIS, Audio and Media Technologies division and one of the members of the team responsible for the development of state-of-the-art speech and audio communication codecs such as EVS, AAC-ELD, and LC3/LC3plus. In this article, he provides a valuable perspective about the technologies and audio codecs that we depend upon to make audio and video conferencing calls. This article was originally published in audioXpress, October 2020.

Gary Galo reviews GeerFab Audio’s D.BOB Digital Breakout Box, a valuable new solution for all the music enthusiasts who would like to listen to their Super-Audio CD (SACD) music collection by feeding the DSD datastream via HDMI from the player to an outboard digital-to-analog converter (DAC) in high-resolution audio. And GeerFab Audio created the first device that delivers! This article was originally published in audioXpress, October 2020.

To complement the extensive perspective of another Market Update feature article on DSP Products and Applications, published in the November 2020 edition, audioXpress was honored to have the valuable contribution from one of the main suppliers in the field. In this article, Youval Nachum, CEVA’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, writes about "The Evolution of Audio DSPs," discussing how DSP technology has evolved, its impact on the user experience, and what the future of DSP has in store for us.

Forced to shelter at home, Oliver Masciarotte looked around his home base in the Twin Cities, and decided it was time to have a serious look at the Magnepan LRS (Little Ribbon Speaker) the company's latest affordable, full-range quasi-ribbon speaker. For this review, Masciarotte writes about what he heard, while Kent Peterson (Warkwyn) measures its performance in the lab. If you are curious to see how does a ribbon speaker measures on a Klippel Near-Field Scanning (NFS) system you definitely want to check out this article, originally published in audioXpress, September 2020.