EET seems to be on a run of interesting articles of late - and here's the latest, about NXP's latest digital amp for smartphone speakers:

Achieving loud, rich sound from micro speakers

So yeah, smartphones are a long way from the high-end you say, so why talk about this at all? Well one sentence at the end caused me to pause and wonder how long before this kind of technology gets used where sound quality (rather than quantity) is paramount. I quote:

This leap in performance illustrates an important design trend. The days of stand-alone amplifiers and converters designed in isolation have gone.

The writer has put his finger on a major reason why the high-end of audio is a relatively stagnant pool for innovation. Pretty much everything's designed in isolation - players, amps, speakers. What if those days really are coming to an end, not just in smartphones but in quality audio too? Smartphones have the volume so there's economic...

My trusty HTC Touch Pro2 kept dialling my last caller last week without my permission so I decided it was overdue for retirement. Can't say as I've ever really bonded with this phone - mainly due to the pants Windows Mobile 6.1.

Last Sunday I went into the Meizu shop and snapped up their M9 to replace it with. This is the first phone (out of 8 I think) I have bought based primarily on the OS (Android) rather than the hardware. That's evidence for the disruptive marketing behaviour of Google in the mobile space. Android wasn't quite available when I upgraded to the HTC around 2 years ago. Now they're claiming around 0.5million activations each day.

One interesting facility in the network menu settings is:

3G networks - turn off to save battery life and stabilize signal

I'd heard that running 3G soaked up juice but this 'stabilize signal' is a first on me. Its quite something when a new technology has the facility to disable it...

On one of my regular pilgrimages to the computer plaza a couple of days ago, I noticed these little puppies. The price apparently was a shade over $80 the pair so I was indeed very curious. A quick peek around the back showed they were not using a standard speaker cable, rather a custom 4-way umbilical between the two boxes. Whenever I see this, my heart misses a beat because what floats my boat is genuine active speakers, not just powered ones which still sport passive crossovers.



Not wishing to ask to disassemble the powered unit on the spot (and doubtless be turned down) I went back home to do some online research. I was pleased to discover these were indeed true actives, and what's more they're powered by TDA8947 chip amps. I'd not come across this part before but its cool at least on paper because its 4 channels in one package - they're using two...

Bought this (well not quite this one, mine has Chinese text on the panel) little puppy yesterday as my old UNI-T was just getting too frustrating to use. In particular its triggering ability is almost useless, giving way too much jitter. That added to the trig level encoder being majorly unreliable (its just over a year old) and lots of apparently self-induced noise on the trace meant I decided to bite the bullet. And boy I'm glad I did - its like getting a new pair of HD800s to replace my aged Sony CD3000s, everything is much clearer.... (and no, I haven't made that particular upgrade yet).

About six months ago I first noticed the younger sibling of this scope in a shop window in the local electronics market. I was blown away - a widescreen scope? That screen was drop dead gorgeous! This pic really doesn't do it justice so hopefully I'll post up one of my own pics soon.

Having been immediately...