Its been over a year since I blogged about DACs, so, long overdue, here's an update. I've abandoned my considerable development on the AD1955 because I found something that's more interesting - multibit. In the first instance - NOS.

A while back I bought a TDA1543 NOS DAC to play with, just to see what all the fuss was about with NOS. Plenty of people have waxed lyrical about the sound. At first listen, I wasn't impressed although it had a certain tonal richness in portraying orchestral instruments that was alluring. Bottom line - its soundstage was compressed front to back. This made it sound a little 'forward' - foreground instruments and voices were more highlighted compared to acoustic spaces ('background').

A second aspect which plagues pretty much all NOS DACs is their frequency response can hardly be termed 'accurate' - owing to the sinc function of first-order hold, they exhibit a significant HF roll-off which begins around 5kHz and reaches 3.2dB...

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...

Is the cloud disruptive?

Here's a cloud website that I consider to have tremendous disruptive potential as technology:

Datasheet Zone & DrawSCH : One stop to find datasheet,IC pinouts and application circuits & Draw schematics online for free!!!

Its potential for being disruptive innovation is so far untapped because I can discern no marketing strategy as yet. I've written to the founder and suggested having a dialogue about all the possibilities presented here. If I get a response, then I'll write more in a later post.

... as the saying goes, everything starts to look like a nail. That's what's happened to me now I've started to look at business through the eyes of disruptive innovation. Its all around, everywhere I look I'm seeing signs of what I call 'disruptive stress'. Perhaps just 'disstress' would be the right term for it - businesses are disstressed.

Nokia is one big business, but its quite clear they are disstressed, big-time. Their 'cooperation' with Microsoft can only lead to one thing - being embraced and swallowed whole and digested as Boa Constrictors are wont to do. Wikipedia says of the Boa :

The size of the prey item will increase as they get older and larger.

OK Nokia's not of great interest to audio guys, so how about one a little closer to home? This morning in my inbox I received the regular missive from EETimes, replete with the latest gossip from the semiconductors world. Topping the bill - Freescale, with its monstrous debt pile. They...

I've been chasing back a little of the history of CMC's idea which I expounded on in the last post. There's nothing new under the sun of course so I'm sharing here some of the writing of Joseph A Schumpeter as I find it pretty inspiring.

I first learned about Schumpeter from reading a book on management compiled from the extensive writings of Peter F. Drucker ('The Essential Drucker'). In one chapter Drucker sounds very much like he's reading from his crystal ball and predicts that where Keynes' ideas ruled the 20th century in economics, it would be Schumpeter's theories that reached ascendancy in the 21st. Having read some of Schumpeter based on that recommendation I'd say that Drucker was indeed spot on.

Here's a short taste of what Schumpeter has to say -

...

This week Bruno Putzeys posted about his innovator's dilemma. You can read that post here:

https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/class...ml#post2608169

In brief he's designed and produced some disruptive technology (UcD, and now nCore) and can't quite see the way forward to turning that technology into disruptive innovation. Disruptive technology is not automatically disruptive innovation - it needs a suitable marketing strategy before its truly innovation. Bruno's using the traditional marketing plans for OEM amplifier modules and finding he's not making much headway.

'No one puts new wine into old wineskins, if it is the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins and so both are preserved'. - Matthew 9:17

Jesus might just as well have been lecturing at Harvard Business School here because this is precisely the message of Clayton Christensen's book...

YouTube - EEVblog #178 - Agilent U1272A Response

Now - out of all the companies Dave mentions, which one is toast? Hint - its a famous name in handheld test and measurement beginning with F and sounds like 'puke'.

Analog guru Jim Williams dies after stroke - 2011-06-13 15:26:32 | EDN

I've been in China for over six years now and had a few ideas about opening my own business. Initially I was giving serious thought to opening a training school. Then after a stint at a travel company for a couple of months I had a great idea about a new kind of travel service. For both of these notions I got domain names registered but I subsequently got more interested in other things (not just women I hasten to add).

Well finally, I've found it. The business opportunity that I've been building up to all my life. I announced it at the public English Corner yesterday to a handful of people as I was curious to gauge their response. Overall, very positive and despite being a kind of business they'd not previously encountered they really seemed to get the message quite quickly.

This isn't strictly speaking a business in the traditional sense of being a company. Its more a network of interested and passionate individuals - cells in a super-organism if you...

I'm wondering how many guys and gals out there on diyaudio are interested in sustainable computer audio? Let me unpack what I mean by this phrase for a moment....

Computers on their present course are obviously not a sustainable proposition. I've already posted about the demise of Intel but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Even if all CPUs move over to ARM A9 or A15 tomorrow there's still a huge unsustainable industry supporting the current wave of computers. There's the drive towards smaller feature sizes in memory which is going to hit a brickwall sooner rather than later. Increasing sizes of memory are like a drug that everyone's got addicted to. Remember Bill Gates' original prophesy that '640k will be enough for everybody'? He really meant it at the time. So I can't help but ask 'do we really, really need all this memory?'. My gut tells me not but to prove it requires some innovative thinking.

One of the things that got me thinking along these lines...