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Welcome
133 years ago this past summer, a tinkerer from
Ohio scratched a kid’s rhyme into tin foil wrapped
around a cylinder. Despite the less than hit-grade
content , the warbly tone, and the lack of bass
response, Tom Edison’s demonstrations astounded
guests and founded the audio entertainment
industry. Only a year before, a gentleman aptly
named Bell had been the first boss to interrupt an
employee with a telephone call, birthing speech
communication by wire. Until the 1980s, sound
reproducers continued to work pretty much the way
Edison’s did, and telephones the way Al Bell’s did;
wiggly Grooves for the former and wiggly electrical
currents for the latter. Why did these technologies
remain in stasis for over a century, before eventually
entering a wildly innovative phase only a couple
of decades ago? The answer is to be found in
Moore’s law, which predicted a half-century ago that
silicon processing power would double every year.
Modified to 18 months, it has been on course since,
and is expected to continue to for at least a few
decades into the future. Think of all the ways this
has touched both your professional and work lives.
Digital audio workstations, automation systems, and
mobile phones are all beneficiaries of this remark-
able progress. The Internet, too, since processing
chips are at the heart of network routers, switches,
servers, PCs and smartphones. (Notwithstanding
The Great Moore’s Law Compensator in desktop
PCs, which suggests that bloat in PC applications
has taken much of what Moore’s Law has given.
Fortunately, we can avoid this in our “embedded”
designs.) So why are we still mostly using telephone
technology scarcely different from Bell’s ancient
prototypes. A nodding acquaintance with history
shows this often to be the case. A technology is
good enough – and good enough suffices. Traditions
grow roots, and the incremental improvement
offered by an innovation is not sufficiently enticing
to displace people from their comfort zones.
But eventually, the capability of a new technology
– or constellation of technologies – reaches beyond
incremental, enabling a fundamental re-thinking
of possibilities. Then POW!, that’s when the world
changes. That is just what is happening now.
Robert Lucky of Bell Labs observed a couple of
decades ago that this ever-increasing power of
digital processing was going to affect communica-
tion more than computation – and that there was
a much stronger driver for change in the former.
The Internet and smartphones have proven him
resoundingly correct.
Such is the situation exactly now with regard to on-
air phones. We now have the tools to achieve what
was only imagination until recently. As you might
know, I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time, so it
is particularly satisfying to see it all coming together.
With the VX, we’ve wedded the capability of modern
networking to the remarkable power of today’s
digital processing to bring the benefits of the result-
ing synergy to broadcast facilities.
As you discover what the VX can do, I trust you will
appreciate how it can enhance the appeal of your
listener interaction segments. It does everything
older systems did smoother, easier, better, and at
lower cost. But it also paves the way for a richer,
more natural connection with your listeners as the IP
platform becomes the basis for tomorrow’s creative
applications. It will be interesting to see what comes
next.
Warm regards,
Steve Church, Founder, April, 2011
Note from Steve
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