DSP

Henry Ford once (supposedly) said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses.” Of course, Henry Ford didn’t make his fortune on faster horses. But what do horses and Ford have to do with audio? We’ll elaborate on that more later, but first some more about Ford. (No, this message was not brought to you by Ford, Built Tough ™.)

Henry Ford made his fortune on the Ford Model T, a product that very literally changed the world. The Model T was far from the first car to be produced and sold, but it was the first car to be mass produced and sold at an affordable price. It was a textbook example of a “disruptive innovation.”

Those of you who are into startups and startup culture will likely be familiar with the concept of disruption. In case you forgot, a product or technology is considered disruptive if it:

1) creates a new market 2) significantly changes or even erases an existing market

The Model T created a new market because most people did not think they could have their own cars. Until that point, cars were a luxury item, hand crafted and extremely expensive. The Model T was technically an inferior car but it was so much cheaper that it didn’t matter. It was so cheap, in fact, that it quickly replaced horse drawn carriages, fulfilling the second part of what defines disruption.

For many disruptive innovations, the first introduction of the concept is often inferior to competing products. For example, the first personal computers were pitifully weak compared to large shared mainframe computers. But they were cheaper and more approachable and gained so much traction that the concept became widely adopted and applied by other companies, leading to a rapid improvement of the technology until it exceeded the previously superior competitor. Modern personal computers are far and away more powerful than old school mainframes, and modern high performance computing is more often done on server clusters, essentially a network of smaller PC-like machines, than on large mainframe machines.

Now, we get back to audio. Arguably the most powerfully disruptive innovation in audio is digital audio technology. The earliest digital audio systems did not sound very good. The D/A and A/D converters were still fairly early stage designs and had a particularly cold and harsh signature. Digital signal processors had severely limited power and did…very little. But the benefits of early digital technology were enough to gain traction and wider adoption, which in turn led to significant improvements to the technology.

Almost 40 years later, we now have D/A and A/D converters that are sonically transparent. With modern high end converters, you can run a signal through a conversion loop dozens of times and have it return essentially unchanged. We have higher bit depths, higher sample rates, better clocks, and DSP chips that put early PCs to shame. Modern hardware also allows more powerful algorithms and processes, both of which are continually improving.

As often happens with disruptive and rapidly changing technologies, the current iteration is criticized for the faults of past versions. Digital signal processing is no exception. It is difficult to keep up with new developments in any technology, and it’s certainly easy to write off DSP as fundamentally flawed. However, recent advancements in DSP have enormous potential, much of which has yet to be explored. Some would have you believe that DSP simply isn’t worth exploring. We believe it is lazy and wasteful for innovative designers to ignore it, which is why we spent so much time and effort investigating DSP. As for what we found, that’s a discussion for another day.