By Pallab Chatterjee
Some products literally sing out for attention—especially to system-level engineers.
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, several in particular were worth noting: the Gibson Dark Fire guitar, the Jones Audio PA-M300 amplifier and display products from Westinghouse.
Gibson in late 2007 introduced its first-generation auto-tuning guitar, aka the “robot guitar.” This was a standard Les Paul guitar that had an analog closed loop system to auto-tune the strings in a short period of time—less than 30 seconds—to either pre-programmed or custom configurations. This year the company introduced a significantly improved, high-speed analog closed loop tuning system—less than 2 seconds, this time—for a similar Les Paul guitar that supports a digital recording interface to Macs and Windows.
The new system improves the feedback loop performance by using low-power higher-bandwidth amplifiers, faster-settling PZTs and servos for the tuning knobs and different pickups. The new system offers overall improved performance at approximately the same price point, while supporting a better power cycle and electronics recording interface. This new technology is dramatically improved in playback and performance capability over “digital” sampling and modeling guitars.
The Dark Fire plays with the same robustness and tone as a standard Les Paul guitar without the auto-tune feature. This solution has been implemented as an advanced “continuous time analog” application, bucking the trend to go with sampled data and a DSP application.
The Jones Audio amplifier, meanwhile, is part of the niche world of high-performance audio. Unlike the majority of products in this space, however, this is not a vacuum tube amplifier. Instead it uses solid-state power devices to drive the 300W+ on the outputs. What made the product standout was the system-level design and analysis that yields an over -120db noise floor. This is the result of both electrical and magnetic isolation of the power supply path from the signal drive circuitry. The design was validated initially with design software to achieve the standard performance. The increased performance was found using traditional engineering bench and application testing to improve performance as the modeling information available for the board and semiconductor design was not sufficiently details to support this level of performance.
The audio performance difference between typical 90db SNR and the 120db+ SNR is easily discernable and truly audible when listening to most music styles. As anyone who works with power supply and amplifier design is aware, the 100db+ SNR world is a rare and unique space, especially in high-power applications.
Westinghouse, meanwhile, has been a well-known brand in the U.S. electronics market for many decades. The company just recently introduced some 19-inch to 32-inch LCD flat panel TVs for the standard 720 and 1080 consumer markets. Interestingly, Westinghouse targeted them at the commercial and industrial markets. In an effort to support the high-resolution/high-definition marketplace, the company demonstrated a 4K flat-panel display. This product was primarily targeted to the 4K and 2K editing marketplace for content creation and for very high performance commercial video applications. It was one of only two 4K displays that were operating and shown at CES, the other being from Sony.
Westinghouses offering was an interesting system application because a large number of the components were shared with the standard lower ASP consumer model displays and utilized a similar user interface.
Westinghouse also showed off some new software for digital signage. As a hardware provider, this product was historically bundled with the displays to support advertising insertion, display scaling and other effects on a windows platform driving the display along with the video feed. As the market has progressed, product was modified to be display manufacturer-independent and hardware-independent, so these advanced video-imaging features can be used on standard PCs with any 720 or 1080 displays. This was one of the few instances where a hardware company became aware of market drivers for their GUI and application base and chose to provide a solution (be it software or software and hardware) to the client base rather than stick with their traditional hardware-only model.