(this is a continuation of our Digital Lens creation story)
With clues One and Two in hand I started to form an idea. What about making a separate piece of equipment that would be digital in and digital out? It would take the wildly variable (and cheesy) master clock signal from the CD, put it into an intelligent buffer (memory), output through a fixed high precision low jitter clock, into a completely separate output stage with its own power supply and wave shaping circuit to provide a 4V beautiful square wave, without any jitter.
Think of this like a large water tank feeding a city. The tank gets filled over days and, because it is a big buffer, it can output an absolutely perfect water stream of constant pressure to as many or as few people as need its water.
I presented my brainstorm product to Arnie Nudell who got all excited and said "in essence, we'll clean up the signal, get rid of any timing and jitter errors, and refocus that data into a perfect output".
"Exactly. Any idea what we could call it?"
Arnie, the nuclear physicist turned speaker designer said, "obviously, it'll have to be The Digital Lens. As in optics, it focuses a blurry image into a sharp image."
Bingo. We now had a concept, a path and a reason for the path, expected results, and a cool new name.
Heck, all we needed now was…something that worked.
Tomorrow we begin the journey of building a new category of product.
