CEDIA 2018 Show Report: Forget DIY and go DIFM - Do It For Me :)

CEDIA Expo is the annual show created by and for the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA), founded 20 years ago to advocate home technology, promoting training/certification, business, and the industry in general. The event was held September 4-8, 2018 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA. Nora Wong and Mike Klasco report from the show floor.

In this Voice Coil Spotlight, Mike Klasco writes about SoundChip, a unique solution provider for active noise cancellation product engineering. SoundChip operates not as consultants but as solution providers and collaborators, enabling product development teams to access a vertically integrated portfolio of technologies, IPs, devices, tools, and services, needed to reliably develop and produce, at scale, high-performance noise cancelling headphones. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, July 2018.

Over the years, audioXpress and Voice Coil magazines have published several company profiles on speaker manufacturers. In 2015, a book was published to celebrate 100 years of the loudspeaker and, in particular, the remarkable contributions of the Danish loudspeaker industry (audio and electronics industry in general is the fourth largest exporting industry in Denmark). This is a valuable book that anyone interested about the loudspeaker industry needs to read.

A reinforced dose of everything that makes Voice Coil the Loudspeaker Industry must-read, the August 2018 edition features an updated directory on Voice Coil manufacturers, while James Croft reviews two patents directly inspired by the work of Dr. Oskar Heil on an Air Motion Transformer (AMT) woofer system. Finally, Vance Dickason characterizes three drivers in Test Bench, including the new Eminence Alpha-5-8 5” midbass driver; the TPL75, a compact pro sound AMT from Acustica Beyma; and a new pro sound compression driver from B&C Speakers.

For engineers developing and evaluating headphones, Audio Precision (AP) released this new headphone test solution, a competitively priced IEC 60318-4-compliant accessory that simplifies earbud and headphone measurements in both lab and production environments. Stuart Yaniger puts the AECM206 unit to the test. This article was originally published in audioXpress, April 2018.

The Voice Coil July 2018 edition is now available and full of great content and insights, apart from the indispensable patent reviews and Test Bench reviews. This edition focuses on Bonding, Dispensing, Coating, and Related Aspects in Speaker Production, and features a great article by Mike Klasco on the topic, as well as an updated industry directory. James Croft reviews a patent for a “Self-bias Emitter Circuit,” awarded to Turtle Beach, while Vance Dickason looks at two interesting new high-frequency transducers, from Radian Audio Engineering, and Spanish OEM manufacturer Beyma.

With InfoComm 2018 already behind us, it's time to look forward, when the very first edition of the Association of Loudspeaker Manufacturing & Acoustics International (ALMA International) Symposium & Expo (AISE 2019), will take place June 9 & 10, 2019, at the Double Tree by Hilton Universal, concurrent with InfoComm 2019, which will be held June 8-14, 2019, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Precisely because of that, we thought it would be fit to properly remember AISE 2018, the last edition which was held this year for the last time in Las Vegas, just before CES.

Preparing for the forthcoming InfoComm 2018 show, this edition of Voice Coil will be a welcome update for all industry professionals. Mike Klasco and Nora Wong discuss the latest trends and technologies for Earphones and Headphones, and provide an updated 2018 directory of leading OEM/ODM headphone and earphone factories. James Croft discusses a new Smart Bass Reflex Loudspeaker patent from Amazon, and Vance Dickason characterizes three different high-frequency drivers: one from a new company, BlieSMA, a dome tweeter from Tang Band (TB) Speaker, and a pro sound compression driver from B&C Speakers.

Voice Coil April 2018 highlights new drivers from Dayton Audio, and BlieSMa, a new OEM brand from Germany. There's an updated directory of Microspeaker vendors, and David Mathew and Joe Begin from Audio Precision explain all you need to know about the basics of testing headphones and earbuds. Vance Dickason characterizes two of the new Ellipticor drivers from Scan-Speak, and we pay tribute to loudspeaker pioneer Ejvind Skaaning (1929 - 2018). Get your copy now!

This month, in Voice Coil, read our AISE 2018 Report, Christopher Struck discusses "Efficiency Bandwidth Product for Loudspeaker Drivers," and James Croft reviews a patent originally claimed in 2013 on a Double Coil Speaker design, now granted to Friedrich Reining (Vienna, Austria), on behalf of Sound Solutions International from China. In this month's Test Bench, Dickason examines two 1" compression drivers: a new PEEK diaphragm compression driver from Precision Devices, the PD.CD1N, and the Peerless by Tymphany DFM-2544R00-08. Download your copy now.