Business Track
Richard Miller
Employee Engagement Specialist
Richard has extensive experience working in the corporate world. He has held executive level politician in Finance, IT and Marketing and understands the importance of employee relations as it relates to growth, profits or any other company goal or initiative.
As an employee engagement and performance specialist,Richard works with companies to increase the number of engagedand committed employees, thus bringing stability, growthand improved morale. This also reduces employee turnover,theft, absenteeism and customer dissatisfaction.
Presentation
How Business Owners and Managers in the Acoustics, Audio and Loudspeaker Industries Can Increase Profits and Productivity with Employee Engagement
In this 1 hour presentation, attendees will learn the new 3 Step Employee Engagement Process
1) How To Truly Know Your Employees With This Easy Survey
2) Determining Your Companies Employee Engagement Ratings
3) How to Utilize Your Employees to Accomplish any Corporate Goal
These 3 steps will enable any manager to improve worker productivity, increase revenue and lower expenses by learning how to engage their employees and work together to fulfill company goals and initiatives.
This employee engagement symposium will be interactive. Members can fell free ask any questions during the presentation and afterwards.
Technical Track
Presenter: Daniel Knighten
Sales & Applications Engineer, Listen, Inc.
Dan is based in Silicon Valley and offers sales and applications support to Listen’s customers in that region. Prior to Listen, Inc. he held various sales, engineering and support positions at Audio Precision for over 10 years, where he acquired a wealth of practical experience testing a wide range of electroacoustic and electronic devices. In addition to his role at Listen, he is also director and founder of Portland Tool & Die, a company that designs and manufactures audio test interfaces which are exclusively distributed by Listen.
A practical guide to measuring Digitally Driven loudspeakers in portable audio devices
New designs need new test methods. Many portable audio devices contain digitally driven loudspeakers, and traditional closed-loop methods where the test stimulus is simultaneously generated and captured, are not suitable for testing such devices. In this tutorial, we explore practical solutions for measuring these systems. We demonstrate how a software based audio test system can be used to upload test signals to a portable device via an appropriate interface (Bluetooth, MEMS, I2S etc.), and explain how sophisticated algorithms use triggering to compare the response to the test signal, thus eliminating delay problems.
Technical Track
Title:A DSP Toolbox for Digital Control of Miniature Loudspeakers
Presenter: Viktor Gunnarsson, Dirac Research AB
Bio: After studying electrical engineering at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, Viktor graduated the Sound and Vibrations master program at Chalmers in 2010. Ever since he has been a part of the R&D team at Dirac Research, specializing in applying and extending Dirac's portfolio of DSP technologies for optimizing the performance of speakers and earphones. Viktor always nurtured a passionate interest in loudspeaker design and sound reproduction, having done many DIY speaker projects.
Abstract: How far is it possible to push the performance of miniature loudspeakers? While speaker driver technology development seems to be reaching diminishing returns, attention has been shifting to the possibilities ofdigital control, of making a 'smart' speaker system where the speaker, amplifier, and signal processing are optimized together.
This tutorial is a case study of the introduction of Dirac's signal processing technologies into the smartphone market, and presents a hands-on introduction to Dirac's toolbox of signal processing technologiesand sound tuning tools developed for micro speakers and equally applicable to speakers of all sizes.
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Tim Gladwin bio
Tim Gladwin began working in audio in 1983 by forming his own audio company to provide PA and recording services. He built 2 recording studios, engineered numerous live events, recorded many artists, wrote, recorded and produced radio shows and provided road support for several acts.
In 1994, Tim began working for the Definitive Technology engineering team (then Blue Systems) on the BP2000 project and soon began designing transducers, and loudspeakers. Tim rose to the position of Acoustic Engineering Manager at Blue Systems. He is the lead acoustic designer on all DT transducers used in current production and for many of the current systems including the award winning Mythos ST-L, Mythos XTR-50, Cylinder, Cube and BP8000 series.
In January 2010, Tim left Blue Systems to run Warkwyn Associates full time. At Warkwyn Tim designs transducers and systems for a variety of international clients. He also represents Klippel in North America for sales and measurement services.
Tim is a member of AES, ASA, ASME and ALMA. He currently holds 5 acoustic patents for transducer and speaker design with several other acoustic patent applications in process. Tim volunteers with two youth organizations: Canadian Pony Club and 653 Squadron Air Cadets.
Mitigating Enclosure Resonances by mapping vibration patterns.
As the market demands speakers that are smaller and lower cost, enclosure vibration is a growing concern. Speaker designers are required to minimize enclosure wall thickness, implement acoustically-challenged industrial design, and work with unfavourable lowest-cost materials. The resulting enclosure vibration and resonance contributes to the overall sound of the speaker, usually in a negative way.
Traditional methods to detect/measure/view enclosure vibration include tactile (finger) testing, accelerometer measurement, and stroboscopic viewing. These methods provide only limited information, and cannot estimate the SPL contribution of the resonating surface. FEA modelling is time consuming and can be misleading if not validated by measurement.
Scanning LASER vibrometry is a mature technique for examining diaphragm and surround issues, but it's greatest potential may be to improve enclosures. This technique precisely measures and visualizes enclosure vibration; from this the software determines the SPL of the surface independent of the SPL from the speaker. The correlation between the measured speaker SPL(f) curve and the SPL(f) predicted from the vibration measurement can be readily checked.
Benefits of this method include the ability to quantify the impact of such vibration, the knowledge to mitigate resonances with surgical precision and the ability to validate the results. This will get better products to market faster.