Telos Hx1 - A Letter from Our President

A LETTER FROM OUR PRESIDENT | VII
“What if?” A singularly great question, because it
opens the door to so many other questions and
ideas. Those who ask it are sometimes called dreamers,
as if that were somehow bad, but history has often
proven dreamers to be the avatars of new and excit-
ing things.
“What if?” was the query asked by Steve Church that
led to the start of Telos Systems. In 1984, Steve –
then a young broadcast engineer and part-time talk
show host – wondered whether emerging Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) technology might be useful
to clean up the terrible caller audio then the norm
at radio stations. The result of asking it was the Telos
10, the world’s rst digital telephone hybrid, a
product that changed the face of radio forever.
Looking back at Telos history, “What if?” is found
at the root of many more technologies broadcasters
have since made ubiquitous. “MP3 bit rates are
perfectly matched to the bandwidth of ISDN; what if
we combined them?” “What if we built a box that let
radio stations stream audio on the Internet?” “What
if we could use Ethernet to treat audio as data and
move it around the radio station in real time?” (By
the way, if you recognized the answers to those
questions as the Zephyr ISDN codec, AudioActive
MPEG encoder and Livewire IP-Audio protocol, give
yourself a cookie.)
Today, as technology roars ahead, we’re constantly
seeking new ways to apply it to the problems of every-
day broadcasting. Voice over IP (VoIP) is particularly
compelling for its ability to packetize high-quality phone
calls and direct them anywhere in the broadcast plant
using ubiquitous, standard Ethernet as a backbone.
A new digital tech called AEC (Advanced Echo Cancel-
lation) is helping to literally eliminate the age-old
problem of feedback in open-speaker environments.
And the prize of using the public Internet for remote
connections as reliable as those of switched circuits
is within broadcasters’ grasp, thanks to ever more
sophisticated coding algorithms.
Pioneering ideas aren’t limited just to technology,
though. We believe that investing in people pays o
big, so we’ve assembled the largest R&D team in the
industry, a talented sta of engineers, scientists and
broadcast professionals. We’re also the rst and only
broadcast equipment maker with a 24/7 support
team ready to oer assistance any time of the day
or night. As they say, radio never sleeps – so neither
do we.
As Telos navigates its third decade in broadcasting’s
choppy waters, the spirit of innovation and ideas
that propelled Steve in the early days is still very
much alive. We’re still in love with radio, still turned
on by new technology, still driven to ask “What if?”
If you’re reading this, you are too — for which we
thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.
Got to go; my phone is ringing. It’s Steve Church,
and I bet he wants to ask me a question…
Michael “Catsh” Dosch
President
A Letter from our President