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Humility and Prayer

Hi-

Thanks, I guess, for the notice.

I have been a loudspeaker design nerd since about 1966, and when I was hired to be the founding contributing editor and columnist for DIGITAL AUDIO magazine (IIRC 1982), I was both fascinated and horrified to learn that the only practical digital recording system was based upon its ability to use Sony's installed base of professional broadcast U-matic ANALOG television video-cassette recorders that had been designed to work with both 50Hz and 60Hz wall-current based video-scan formats.

Hunh? I thought this was a Brave New World?

So I then looked into things and realized that the reason Sony's standard prevailed (and Soundstream's failed) was that any radio/TV broadcaster, fr'instance in the EC, who had an installed base of the bog-standard Sony U-matic ANALOG video recorders had more than half of what they needed to record S/PDIF digital audio.

Indeed, back in the day, UHF Channel 44 in the Boston area, late at night, used to broadcast Boston Symphony live digital recordings over the air, as video programs one could record to a VHS cassette, and with the proper mod/demod, get digital audio. Criminy!

So then I went (compressing decades in slow motion) to puzzling about the 75-Ohm RCA roots of S/PDIF in analog television, to the origins of coaxial cable in the efforts to keep transatlantic telegraphic cables from blowing up under the strain of mutually-induced currents in the opposite polarity, to Oliver Heaviside's single-handed, pure-math based, invention of coaxial cable (1880).

Heaviside's invention--largely unheralded, because he was a self-taught peasant--was in effect (despite the facts that he had to co-invent vector analysis and independently invent an operational calculus that was functionally equivalent to Laplace transforms, that I had tried to get my mind around in prep school, but totally failed) was to enclose a solid-core DC conductor in a tubular Faraday Cage 2,000 miles long...

So, the Humility part is that I am not fit to tie Oliver Heaviside's shoes, and that I have never spent a moment thinking that I was smarter than the guys who made "PCM over S/PDIF" work.

Where was I?

Oh. Years ago, despairing of being able to afford a digital cable I loved, I did some half-assed design work (Charley Hanson says my math was unimpeachable, but that every one of my premises was faulty, yet: we remain friends) and I had made some prototypes.

So, when I escaped from Ceausescu's Romania in a hot-air balloon made out of rubber raincoats (kidding!), I ended up in the Peoples' Democratic Republic of Rhode Island, and I refined the prototypes, and I was thinking, I'd make a few cables for friends, but, a couple/few heavy hitters heard the most recent prototype and said, "Hey, Johnny Puddles, this here is your ticket out of the Federal Witness Protection Program," and I fell for that.

But at the last minute I panicked, and I made a couple of modifications.

So, not having heard the modifications, when the bill came due on the first production batch, I literally prayed, "Please let these not sound worse than the last prototype." When I heard a randomly-selected cable from the first batch, I had to wipe away tears of relief. I had dreaded having to give them away to Goodwill and write it all off.

I will never claim that I had made the best anything. But I really feel that if I was a consumer, this is a cable I'd be willing to buy.

I hope this provides the background. I never for a moment thought that I had a "name" to cash in on. I am just rather obsessive about "Material Culture and Technology," which is what I got my undergraduate degree in, and the curious history of cable design and of digital audio have always been of interest. E.g., PCM was invented in the 1930s as a way to increase the carrying capacity of transatlantic cables beyond their purely electrical capacity, by multiplexing... But, I obsess.

ATB,

John

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