Unforgiving engineering
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsOne thing I like about engineering is its honesty. Circuits do not care what your opinion or mood are, they either work or they don’t.
If I have a strong conviction on a subject I can search for supporting opinions and find them—lots of them—bolstering my belief whether right or wrong according to facts. (Yes, there are still facts in this world). But engineering doesn’t allow me that luxury. No matter how hard I try to convince a P-type transistor that it is really an N, the circuit laughs in my face.
Good engineering practice demands attention to detail and a refreshing and unforgiving honesty that I find both maddening and envigorating depending on which side of success I am on. When a circuit refuses to cooperate and I can’t figure out why it can be one of the most frustrating experiences imaginable. But, when the truth is uncovered, the circuit’s secrets revealed, the satisfaction of a job well done is extraordinary. Something those who have not faced engineering’s relentless demands for truth will likely ever experience.
There are few things in this world that require so much from us but, in exchange, offer so much back.
The hard-won beauty of engineering lies in its unforgiving nature.
Being an audiophile is/can be very subjective based upon “…what we as individuals prefer in terms of musicality, component aura, tonal balance, etc…” However our hobby requires that we establish a solid foundation of requirements that drive us toward our audio nirvana. So in a way I find being an audiophile causes us to follow a scientific “problem solving regime” in that we must “tinker” with all the various components – room acoustics, electronics, cabling, budgetary constraints, etc., until our desired objective is met.
Good engineering practice might be a standard procedure in the fields of civil engineering and mechanical engineering documented by safety standards. But I doubt that software engineers follow similar standards or are even educated to follow minimal safety standards. A recent experience with a new version of my software player revealed a huge improvement in sound quality proving that the older version was far from correctly transmitting the data from the HDD to the RAM and to the USB output. The actual Intel processor bugs show the lack of a minimum quality standard concerning safety against hacker attacks. Well-fortified medieval cities were better protected against aggressors. :-)
They used to hack fortresses in the old days by digging tunnels under them or lobbing pestilent carcasses over the walls.
Ted Smith keeps on coming up with new software for PSA, so I wonder what standards he works to. If there were software standards, we would never need updates. Everyone sends out updates, with the sole exception of Leica, either because (a) they get it perfect first time (b) they would hate to admit it wasn’t perfect first time, or (c) being German, it’s in their nature.
If I hadn’t bought Devialet, I would have bought AVM purely for it being German and apparently massively over-engineered. I did have a hugely over-engineered German turntable, the Clearaudio Champion 2 and Unify tonearm. It weighed 40kg and was a real work of art. The unipivot seemed to float on air. The only problem with it was (a) it collected dust like a hoover and (b) when you lowered the tonearm it drifted about 1cm so I often missed the disk. Whoever designed that is probably now working at Renault.
” If there were software standards, we would never need updates.”
I read the above, and after pondering it for a few minutes, decided that if it was posted by someone who is not a regular, it would be an obvious troll.
Paul was talking about physical circuits, but even circuits can be made to work by adding a number of parts that might get you past the problem, but it would be a poor solution. A good circuit designer only makes a circuit as complex as needed to reach their goal. Some are impressed by a component that has a box jammed full of parts, I prefer it to be as simple as possible, to accomplish the goal.
How do you explain makers of DAC chips putting out a new generation of chips every couple of years? We’re they poorly engineered, or did they find ways to make it more versatile, faster, and more powerful?
Any device that is not purely mechanical, that runs on firmware, can benefit from firmware updates. Look at your device, a laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone. Every one of them, gets software, and firmware updates. Why, could be many reasons, the bad guys found a vulnerability, or the programmers found a better way to do something. It could be the addition of new features.
You can’t really believe that if there were software standards, we would never need updates. In Ted’s case, the product that he helped create, didn’t need updates, it got excellent reviews. PSA, could have left it as is, and kept the last four or five updates on the shelf, then released Directstream Type 2, maybe added some new type of caps, a reworked power supply, and marketed as the next generation. I look at those firmware updates as a gift. Some companies might have charged a fee for them. Software has one standard, that it works, and with apps, that it works with a variety of devices.
Doesn’t your Devialet get firmware updates? Are they because they found ways to improve their product, or due to a lack of standards?
Sounds like the problems with your turntable could have been solved with a dustcover, when not being used, and either a different tonearm , or some fine tuning. Was it being caused by the anti skate, or not level? What did you replace it with?
I was responding to paulsquirrel’s comment about software standards (or the lack of them).
Devialet was created around two main patents, for a Class A/D amplification design and a type of power supply. Their record on software is very poor. The new streaming card is going through a beta programme and I await the day it works properly.
Fortunately those miners couldn’t work without producing heavy noise. This noise was monitored by the beleaguered who activated miners for building tunnels for finally blowing up the attacking miners. This helped for instance to save Vienna from being conquered by the Mussulmen. :-)
I must oppose ;-)
Leica launches error corrected updates and improvements of their lenses every few years.
If the DS DAC would be Leica and they made a firmware update, they would probably have renamed it, painted the front red and sold it as a 15.000 $ special edition (something like this: https://leicarumors.com/2017/12/14/leica-camera-officially-unveils-special-edition-leica-m-typ-262-with-red-anodized-finish.aspx/)
just kidding, you know I like Leica anyway ;-)
Regarding paulsquirrel’s and your comment regarding software development/standards/quality assurance etc.:
I’m a mechanical engineer working in the IT of the automotive industry (strange enough). IMO given all the complexity mechanical engineering can have, SW engineering will beat it, especially in terms of non foreseeable security risks. And: quality control (SW or elsewhere) is a matter of demand, cost, time and I’d say you can’t let creative folks do this extensively as you will loose them. That’s a job for other folks and if it shall be perfect just needs time and money, but no brilliant minds.
IMO whoever wants close to nuclear industries quality and security standards in audio should leave the DAC on the first firmware release and just spin discs.
Has anyone done Special Edition audio? How about a red anodized Sprout?
Of course the Leica software was probably developed by Panasonic in Japan and most of the best audio software seems to come out of the Far East these days. They are obviously inscrutable and willing to test audio and cameras to nuclear quality status.
I feel sorry for Zeiss as Sony’s software stinks.
Klaus Bunge of Odyssey Audio was doing color anodizing more than a decade ago, maybe two.
I don’t know Ted Smith but he seems similar to a few rare engineering with whom I’ve worked that simply cannot stop chasing perfection even if they desired so.
The Devialet is far sexier than the AVM.
There are software standards for industrial control systems. Here’s a critical example;
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6581844/
These are the standards electric utility substations must meet. An error could result in a disaster. These systems must be validated through extensive testing before they are installed. Nevertheless mistakes are made. During my work at Bellcore, one of the RBOCs, I think Southwest Bell installed software from a third party that shut their entire network down. Bellcore went though several million lines of code to find the problem within about a day to get their network back up and running. Worldcom created a software driven disaster around 1998 that shut down the Chicago Board of Options for an entire week. A software glitch in a company called Knight Capital cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in 45 minutes. It was a factor that eventually resulted in their bankruptcy.
Whether control systems are relay logic, transistor logic, or software logic, bypassing them is risky business and you must know exactly what you are doing if you risk it. Usually it is against any sane company’s policy. This was the mistake that resulted in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of an insane experiment gone wildly wrong subsequent to bypassing safety systems. Could our utility systems be hacked by an enemy as part of an attack on the US? No one is certain but the government is concerned even if it isn’t in the news every day.
So even if a P-type transistor self-identifies as an N-type, it is in reality still a P-type?
:-) Yes, transistors pay no attention to political correctness. It’s best bet would be to redefine positive and negative, but even then it would be a bit weedier than a well-developed true npn type.
..but there are politicians who could easily redefine a transistor…the transistor and the nation would have no choice…there’d be even some voting for this ;-)
Yes, but engineers in the LGBTQ community worked hard to enable such transistors to find useful and satisfying jobs by creating the quasi complementary circuit.
I would like to say immediately that I have nothing against quasi-complementary output stages. Some of my best amps have been quasi-complimentary and they are very acceptable, providing they are responsible and use a Baxandall diode. However, for those with liberal social pretensions, might I suggest the fully complementary design as a better model. PNP and NPN transistors working together in perfect harmony, and you can also use DC coupling to the speakers!
You statement is contradictory. On the one hand you are in favor of forcing transgender transistors to lead the life you want them to but at the same time seem to proud of enabling AC/DC behaviour.
I am proud of having managed to squeeze AÇ/DC into a fairly laboured analogy!
This brings back a flood of memories. During the summer between graduating high school and starting as a college freshman I took a speed reading course. By the time I was done I could read 800 words a minute. Fat lot of good that did. A few months later I’d be up late at night taking hours to plough through two or three pages of a physics textbook.
Engineering is an art that applies science to solve practical problems. The language of science is mathematics. Mathematics is a closed system of logic that is perfect within itself but it is not an exact description of the real universe. It’s just the best tool we have and it is universally understood. Here’s how a typical engineering class works. The professor draws a diagram which in my day was with chalk on a green slate board that represents something comprehensible and assigns some mathematical symbols to various parts of it. Then he writes an equation or two about it. and then it’s off to the races for the next 45 minutes where he writes equation after equation after equation. You’re so busy copying them down you don’t have any time to think about what they mean. After a day of this you go home and try to solve problems in the back of a chapter of a text that were assigned. You look at the problem, the variables you have, the equations, and you try to figure out how to get from what you have to where you want to go. You do this endlessly in one course after another after another. So what they are teaching you is not what to think which you will forget but can always look up again but HOW to think. Do this enough times successfully by proving it on exams and they give you a diploma and send you out into the world where you quickly learn on your first job that you don’t actually know anything.
On my first job at Bethlehem Steel I was one of about 180 engineers recruited from around the country in a management training program to work at various plants. At the time Bethlehem Steel was the 26th largest company in the United States, For a month each morning we’d get a talk from a vice president or plant manager and see films about the company, steelmaking, ship building, and other businesses the company was engaged in. The afternoons were spent touring the Bethlehem plant. We were told it would take five years for them to turn us from a graduate of an engineering school into a genuine engineer. It took me ten years (I was doing other things along the way.) It’s like be an apprentice, being mentored by more experienced engineers the way a graduate of a medical school has to become an intern and then a resident at a hospital before he goes out in the world to make sick people poor.
So engineering is about defining problems, understanding the scientific principles that are relevant to solving it, gathering the information you need, and putting it together in the form of an integrated system that works. The results are measured by metrics, that is measurements comparing what was achieved with the original goal. I’ve nearly been killed on the job more than once. It was never my own fault, it was the result of circumstances I was unaware of or equipment failure. Frankly I’m lucky to still be alive but I have no intention of stopping. It’s just too much fun.
Soundmind you are spot on with my own experience only mine was Chemical Engineering. I remember one course in my second year where the class average on the first test was a 55. We were told we were all idiots. Thank god they scaled the grades! It was an intellectual boot camp with about 25% of the freshman class staying in the major into senior year. Buy the time I graduated I could look at a formula and visualize the shape of a curve and how factors in the formula impacted the outcome. Then off to the real world, which as you say, the actual benefit was teaching you how to solve problems mathematical or otherwise.
Hopefully this process is still in use in Engineering schools but I am not certain….
Stevens Institute of Technology created a curriculum they called a “unified curriculum” which was designed to become obsolescence proof. The difference between that course and more conventional curricula was that they gave only two degrees, Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Engineering. You majored in one field your last two years but you got exposed to every field and the courses were as hard as they could make them. For example, the text for Freshman Chemistry was the same book my neighbor used for an honors junior year chemistry course at Columbia University. First day; “you will commit this 40+ step derivation of the Neils Bohr model of the hydrogen atom to memory and reproduce it on a quiz next week.” It was months before we even saw chemical reactions in class, the first months were devoted to subatomic quantum structure of atoms as a foundation for understanding how they work. I could have become a chemical engineer had I wanted to. I took a lot of chemistry courses including organic at Johns Hopkins, CW Post, and at the University of Bordeaux where I also got courses in biochemistry (I’d read a lot of it on my own prior) and physical chemistry. I also took a course in fluid dynamics where the lab was under the supervision of the chemical engineering department. In all of my chem labs, there were NO EXPLOSIONS. :-)
To this day I still know a lot of chemistry and biochemistry. But my fascination for electrical engineering and physics was stronger. I knew cold fusion wasn’t going to work as soon as I saw it. We had one scientist working on it at Bellcore. When you think about it, chemical energy is a specialized area of electrical energy…. and geometry.
The entrance requirements at Stevens were tough. My high school adviser told me not to waste my time applying, I’d never get in. There were 420 Freshmen at orientation. They said; look to the person to the left of you, look to the person to the right of you, look at yourself. One of you three will NOT graduate. And they were about right there were only 240 graduates in my class. I really don’t know what that school is like today. The last time I was there it looked more like a corporate campus than a college campus and everywhere you went they had their hand out for money. The President of the school turned out to be a crook who kept two sets of books, went on junkets all over the country “to raise money” lost one third of the school’s endowment, and got super low rate or zero rate mortgages for two $1,000,000 houses from the school. He should have been indicted and gone to prison but I think there were political strings pulled. The school is the oldest technology school in the US and the first thing you’re told was that Colonel Stevens invented the steamboat, it was better than Robert Fulton’s and Fulton only made a commercial success of it. They had a castle there but it was torn down for a 12 story high rise building and a 4 story adjacent multipurpose building. Stevens is built on a “bluff” :-) and has a commanding view of the New York City skyline from the Jersey side approximately across from 14th street i Manhattan. It was also a great location to watch OP Sail in 1976.
I wonder if today’s engineering schools are as rigorous and demanding as what you all went through. I taught anthropology at an elite liberal arts school back in the 90s and students expected to get their A grades without having to bust their tales. Mommy and daddy had paid handsomely so that Sally and Johnny could attend, so there was an expectation of what was due to them. A sense of entitlement. Of course, this was not all the students, but enough to really cause me to wonder if this generation has the grit required to create and build the things that our parents generation did. I also taught at the U of California completing my graduate work. Engineering students had trouble with open-ended assignment that required independent research and creativity. They also expected good grades because they believed that social science should be that much easier than their engineering course work.
Ah yes, Evelyn Wood’s speed reading classes… Still use my finger at times.
I went through an electrical apprenticeship at US Steel in the 1970s (politically related) and did a lot of rebuilds and new installations. We worked with the engineers a lot. Blueprints typically didn’t have much to do with reality, so we were always grateful for the few who understood that and worked with us as collaborators.
I just got into a feud over in another forum concerning one manufacturer (not to be named) forbidding opening the component’s case. In doing so, I would void the warranty. Though the product is an engineering gem (on paper)… It needed a good fuse to sound its potential! Tell me if I am wrong? I found that to be engineering dishonesty …. I might be wrong about the matter. But, I felt cheated by the engineering that would not provide an easy access fuse holder. Even to provide a high end holder for a few dollars more would suffice. It was like getting a performance car that stated you must only use the average tires it came with. Needless to say, I opened the case and proved my point.
What? If you open the case it voids the warranty? Aside from being illegal, that’s just plain silly. Just so you know most states and countries have pretty strict laws governing this kind of stuff. We’re required to warrant the product for as little as a year (and more in some states and countries) from manufacturing defects. Obviously, if you open the chassis and mess with it you can void the warranty. But opening the chassis? Bull. Don’t be intimidated. Nor would I do business with such a manufacturer.
It says on the case… No User Serviceable Parts inside. All I wanted to do was change the fuse to a Hi Fi Tuning fuse. That is a serviceable part for anyone with basic knowledge of components.
The reason given for the threat? Is to avoid being sued if a person hurts himself.
Here is one comment: “This is to protect us, in the Litigious States of America, from those who would attempt to mod it…while it is plugged in…while they are taking a bath. Don’t laugh. ”
I do not want to mod it. But, was told if its opened the warranty would be voided. I sent one component back because it had a seal on the case. I do not know if it is a law specific to their state that forced them to take their position.
Could be a matter of simply covering their butts. Others who were aware of the situation believe that they are forced to take that stand. But if it were opened? And, damage was clearly not related to the fuse.. the advice assumed was that it would be covered by the warranty. But that is an outsider’s assumed position and not fact.
But, if the law is what it is? The company can not say that would be the case. Its a weird place to be caught in. It may be the fault of California law that I have seen demanding warnings and stipulations on many products that we do not normally see as a problem from elsewhere.
We used to print that on our cases too in the hopes people would stay out. I get it. But still, it makes no sense. We changed our policy to keep it simple. Basically you can do what you want, but if what you do damages the unit then the warranty costs are on you. If what you did does not impact the unit and something we did or should have done is making it fail we cover it still.
The only caveats to this have been when people pour gunk or add audiophile powders or adhesive strips inside making it impossible for us to put it back to standard. Then, we refuse to work on it. In one case the unit was stuffed full of bags of white powder (for RF) and we called the police. Not knowing what was in those bags we didn’t want to risk our people’s health. The police grilled the owner over the phone and got convinced it wasn’t a threat. We then cleaned out the powder and gave the unit to one of our people to take home.
Thanks Paul…
That explains a lot. My guess is that the company suffers from the oppressive Nanny State syndrome . California is horrible in how it requires warnings on everything. They ought to have one that says.. “Reading and believing these California warning labels may be hazardous to your health.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/12/14/warning-life-causes-death-californias-toxic-warning-label-racket/#5e8627791de6
So I just checked in on the post today after it was first posted this morning and my anti-malware programs on my computers won’t let me access saying there are malicious code issues. I had to post this from my iPad. Anyone else having this issue? I tried getting in both with Chrome and IE but Malwarebytes Pro blocks it. Could this be a leftover from the prior issues I think were talked about? Maybe Malwarebytes and others have PS Audio in their block database?
OK maybe never mind, I exited the browser and cleared my cache and now it seems happy. So….if anyone else has this error you can try what I did.
Yes, we got hacked again but it was fixed within the hour. We’re on to them.
It is ironic that good engineering, such as of electrical circuits, demands exceptional empirical and experiential knowledge and attention to design details, and yet at the subatomic level no one even knows how electricity works. Mathematical equations to theorize electricity and other forms of electromagnetic waves rely on such constructs as imaginary numbers involving the square root of negative one. Yet some people demand scientific proof explaining why one cable sounds different than another!
Like!
Sometimes in the evenings voting works, but unfortunately not today…
One of the things I love about studying electricity is that there is no way to prove it exists. All we can do is observe and infer that it must exist because we have no other explanation for what we presume are its effects. I’m a ghost buster. Dictators like the leaders of China may control over a billion people but I control countless trillions of electrons. When I say MARCH the have no choice. And when I say stop they listen and do what I say…. most of the time.
Unforgiving engineering …. After the fire is out and the smoke clears, everyone is suddenly an expert :-)