#270 – An Interview With Dafydd Roche

Dave Jones: This is the F-Hour Podcast. Recorded October 7th, 2015. Episode 270. An interview with Davith Roche. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Davith Roche: And I'm Davith Roche, Audio Systems Engineer at TI and co-owner of Expat Audio.

Dave Jones: He's a busy guy. Thank you very much for joining us, Davin. And we all got your name wrong.

Davith Roche: Yeah. Don't worry, the world butchers it. It's all fine.

Dave Jones: Because it's spelled D-A-F-Y-D-D. Double D on the end.

Davith Roche: Well, yes. Yes, quite. Double D in Welsh, which is where I'm from. Wales is where I'm from. It becomes a the sound. So it's Davith. But, you know, it's a common name back home. And then everywhere else outside of Wales is just nothing. Yeah, yeah. It's four or five years of my school year. Oh, really? Without going into too much detail, it's the Welsh equivalent of David. Ah, got it. Got it.

Dave Jones: Okay. So you would still have trouble getting like a username on, like an account on Gmail and Twitter and stuff like that.

Davith Roche: Somewhat, somewhat, somewhat. You know, every once in a while I have to do that, you know, safe Google yourself thing. You know, everybody does it once in a while. Yeah, yeah. There's only one of me. So it's not too difficult. Excellent.

Dave Jones: And we're going to talk about audio.

Dave Jones: Which...

Davith Roche: Yes, we are. I'm quite excited.

Dave Jones: I'm actually a little scared, to be honest.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because Chris is supposed to be an audio guy, but he doesn't really know much.

Dave Jones: Well, analog guy, but yeah, I mean, it's not always the same thing. I don't know. There's just so much like other stuff in there that, you know, it's outside of my realm.

Davith Roche: I've always thought of it as a lovely discipline of its own. It's, you know, the only disappointment is when people take it a little bit too far and become snobbish about it. And use it as a kind of a differentiator. I'm better than you because I know more about this discipline than you. Right. Yeah. Yeah, those guys, I don't get along with those guys either. They're normally the neckbeards.

Dave Jones: Okay. And the snake oil salesman. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Which I'm sure we'll get into. So tell us, what do you do at TI and how long have you been there and all that sort of jazz?

Davith Roche: Oh, so I've 14 years at TI.

Dave Jones: Jeez, you get less for murder.

Davith Roche: Yeah. It feels like it some days, you know, get a metal can and wring it against the old bars. I just, I just. So I started in sales there and worked my way through marketing. And these days I'm a definition engineer. What we would call a systems engineer.

Dave Jones: Whoa, whoa, hang on. That's a new wank word we haven't heard of. A definition engineer.

Davith Roche: Well, I'm trying to use, every company calls them a different thing. So some semiconductor companies call us architects, some call us definition engineers, and TI calls us systems engineers.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, we've talked about, I think about like kind of product marketing too, where like you're kind of figuring out what needs to go in the chip in order for it to actually sell.

Davith Roche: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I went through product marketing. Product marketing typically takes a product that's almost finished and starts, you know, marketing around companies all over the world, right? So like the marketing guy I work with, who is, puts up with a lot from me, he will, you know, I'll give him the data sheet and everything. I'll say, hey, we're about to release this in a couple of months, man. Go drum up some business for me.

Dave Jones: Right. You better sell this thing. Exactly, exactly, exactly. I don't know what it does.

Davith Roche: This is my baby we're talking about. You better sell this thing. So it's, yeah, he puts up with a lot.

Dave Jones: That's good. That's good.

Davith Roche: But yeah, definition is visiting customers, like key customers, you know, who really influence the design, negotiating with them and then coming back to the factory, negotiating with the design team. And, you know, the design team want to do as little as possible and the customer wants you to do as much as possible.

Dave Jones: Exactly. What, would you ever do a chip specifically for one customer and go, well, as long as they buy it, there are enough business for us. And if anyone else wants to buy it, meh, you know.

Davith Roche: You know, that's a tough one. I could have said maybe 10 years ago we could have done stuff like that. Right. And, you know, we did, right? You know, there's a number of chips that came out that, you know, had, you know, for instance, mobile phone type of customers behind them. Yeah, of course, yeah. And, you know, I mean, the volume for those could have justified the development. And then it was like, okay, who else are we going to sell this to? Yeah. But I think generally across the whole industry now, everyone's kind of waking up and going, you know, the development costs, the development risk is so much higher now than it was that we have to have a mass market plan before we start development. Interesting. Right. So it's not enough to just say, hey, you know, some, I don't know, Korean customer or Chinese or Japanese customer wants us to make one of these and, you know, we'll sell so many million units. Well, you know, development costs being what they are and risk as well, you know, because if you're not working on this project, you could be working on another. Right. There's opportunity costs that's always terrifying.

Dave Jones: So even at a massive company like TI, you're still concerned about, well, this mask set is going to cost us, you know, a million bucks or whatever.

Davith Roche: So I can't comment on costs and stuff. Oh, no, no, no. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not always just the mask costs, right? There are other costs involved. For instance, you know, if you have a big design team working on a project, every month that they're working on that project, you know, you have a 10-man design team and, you know, you could burn through that kind of, you know, what we would call PG cost, you know, the tape out cost within a month or two. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I mean, engineers are expensive.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it's not just their wages cost. I mean, most companies have their own internal rate of what an engineer costs them.

Davith Roche: Exactly. Exactly.

Dave Jones: You know, cost in actual quote marks, you know, because, yeah, it's like a multiplier, like three times. They might earn 100K a year, say, but it'll cost the company like 300K or something. I usually put it at 250, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And then it's easy. Yeah, right. Every million, every four engineers is a million bucks, right? Right. Super simple calculation.

Davith Roche: That's a big cost, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Davith Roche: And so, yeah, unless you're in the business of making, you know, tens of dollars per chip, right? Right. You're making a chip that can sell tens of millions of pieces. It's always going to be a struggle to do, you know, to kick off, you know, big projects, you know, adventurous projects, if you will.

Dave Jones: Does this change because it's audio versus other? I mean, I'm guessing with consolidation in the industry, it's kind of across the board like this. But with audio, it seems like, I mean, there's probably more features you can put into a single chip, you know, integrating more and more pieces on top of it. But it's not like there's new amplifier types on a regular basis or anything like that, right? I mean, it's mostly process improvements, stuff like that, shrinking, adding features. Is that correct?

Davith Roche: I mean, we're always chasing in every direction possible. You know, you can just imagine a circle, right? And, you know, if you push up, you know, that might be how many watts of power you have in an amplifier, right? That's one way to grow the overall space. You know, the other one could be getting a lower noise floor. You know, a lot of people focus on pop and click. You know, when you power the amplifier up, does it deafen you with pops and clicks and so on? And, you know, we have customers who really push us to the limits on that stuff. You know, we'll have customers who will take a 300-watt amplifier, single chip or 400-watt single chip, and they'll turn off the subwoofer. They'll put the ear right up. Yeah, it's loud. They put the ear right up next to the tweeter, and then they nod to switch the amplifier on. And you're like, good grief, if this thing pops, you know, it will be lifting his ears off the wall.

Dave Jones: Yeah, so it's, you know, those are pretty tough metrics to live by. And really, really reckless testing, too, I have to say. I mean, that's just, come on, at least get an intern, right?

Davith Roche: Yeah, well, you know, I think they're expecting the diving save, you know? It's kind of like a big game of chicken. Do you dare me? Do you dare me? Come on. Call me chicken. Switch it on. Sorry. Except in Japanese.

Dave Jones: Now, although you're not a chip designer yourself, do you know if it's, well, easier in quote marks, to design like a real high-powered chip slash die, or whether it's easier to design a lower power and like lower noise, lower distortion, for example. Oh, that's interesting. I don't expect you to know the answer if you haven't actually done the silicon.

Davith Roche: No, no, well, I've been around enough of them. Yeah, I figured you might. These designers complaining about their job. You know, it really is a horses for courses kind of game. So, you know, if we look at, you know, you'll have some designers who are maniacally focused on ultra-low battery life, right? And that's all they think about. And, you know, they're thinking, how can I make this MP3 player, you know, go from an 8-hour playback time to a 24-hour playback time and so on? How can I enable that kind of thing? Those are different concerns than the guy who's trying to make a, you know, 400-watt stereo amplifier on a single chip. Now, I will grant you that, you know, both ends of the market are beginning to merge. And some of the things we care about, you know, and the ultra-low power is starting to sneak into the high-power speaker and so on. Right. But it's… Really?

Dave Jones: You wouldn't think that was needed.

Davith Roche: Well, okay, maybe not at 400 watts, but maybe at 20 or 40 watts. Okay.

Dave Jones: Enough to still blow your ears out, right?

Davith Roche: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, this is more or less… Yeah, my opinion on this is, you know, there aren't many people, unless you go to South America, where people like to play, you know, 2,000, 5,000 watts in their cars and so on. There aren't that many people listening at 400 watts, okay? But what you do get at 400 watts is acres of distance between your average power level and the peak, which is headroom, right? Yes. So you'll get better distortion performance. You'll get better distortion performance from a 400-watt amplifier outputting 10 watts than you would from a 20-watt amplifier doing 10 watts.

Dave Jones: Of course, by nature of the dynamic range. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The headroom with the amp.

Dave Jones: Can you explain some of these? I mean, so I feel like one of my trepidations about this industry as well is like the different terms for things that are… It feels like there's other terms for them in other industries. Yep. Like there's a lot of distortion type of terms and headroom obviously is talking about, you know, dynamic range and stuff like that. Could you explain some of those terms? I mean, is there like common vernacular that people should know around audio equipment like that?

Davith Roche: Oh, you know, I've got a fantastic one for you. The main one that frustrates me the most in the world. People look at the marketing number and look at the number of bits. Oh, my goodness. This has got a 24-bit converter in it. This is marvellous. A 36-bit. Oh, my goodness. And, you know…

Dave Jones: Aren't some of them marketed this 36-bit or something ridiculous, 32-bit or something ridiculous? Exactly.

Davith Roche: So, you know, just to maybe, Chris, you know, but to give you guys a little bit of background, you could typically multiply the number of bits by six to give you the dynamic range. There's a fancier multiplication than that, but generally it's about six. So, a 16-bit converter, which is what CD standard, right? CD was defined to be 16-bit. It gives you about 96 dB of dynamic range.

Dave Jones: Right. Everything's dBs, right?

Davith Roche: And everything's in dBs because the human hearing is logarithmic.

Dave Jones: Right.

Davith Roche: And so, you know, 96 dB, I mean, you know, when CDs first came out, I thought they sounded pretty dang good. And I still think they sound good if they're well-recorded in the first place. All right. So, 24-bit then is 144 dB dynamic range.

Dave Jones: Right.

Davith Roche: Now, let's put this in perspective. The human hearing, if you sat in a room, in a quiet room by yourself doing nothing for three weeks, you might be able to expand your hearing to the, you know, to the absolute minimum. That's the kind of running joke you have to run to.

Dave Jones: Is that because of averaging, you're saying? Like, just over time?

Davith Roche: Yeah. Yeah. Your ear actually has a way of protecting itself. It actually, the eardrum tightens, I believe. Right. Interesting. I hope you don't get like a biomechanics who tells me I'm talking real crap here. But my understanding is that it tightens up instead of what protects the ears. That's why when you go to a loud concert and the next day you feel deaf for a couple of days and then suddenly the hearing comes back. That's actually the protection mode of the ears. So, the human hearing can roughly hear up to about 130 dB of dynamic range. And that's for someone who's got spectacular hearing. So, you know, and that's the difference between basically hearing atoms hit your eardrum, right? You know, the smallest thing you can hear all the way to the loudest thing, which includes damage.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Davith Roche: Right. So, that's, I think, a maximum of 130 dB. So, a 24-bit converter at 144, why? Why bother?

Dave Jones: Right.

Davith Roche: Because of noise, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, yeah. Because the THD down there is like, I've worked with like the world's best 24-bit analog to digital converters with a really low bandwidth at 2 kilohertz. And they're still only getting, you know, 130 dB, minus 130 dB noise floor. You know, you can't get the full 24 bits out of them.

Davith Roche: No, you start worrying, you know, when we talk about the voltage noise in a system like that, you start worrying about the thermal noise of the resistors at that level.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. Right, right, right.

Davith Roche: And so, you know, really, the things I look for, you know, the first thing I look for is what the dynamic range of the system is, you know, and then, you know, what the distortion looks like. The bits of the converter mean absolutely nothing. And if there's one piece of advice, you know, I can impart on anybody listening is, you know, look a little bit further. Scratch the surface of the specs. And a lot of the good manufacturers actually do show now what their THD specs are and what their signal device.

Dave Jones: Even on the front page of the data sheet, come on, you guys. Oh, yeah. We always talk about this on the AirPower about how you put the banner specs on the front page of the data sheet. And then you hide all this stuff down in the spec tables.

Davith Roche: I don't know what you're talking about, mate. I don't know what you're talking about, mate. Yeah. The bastard's bathroom.

Dave Jones: No. So this is your job, right? This is your job?

Davith Roche: That is the, yeah, exactly. That's the other bane of my existence is writing data sheets. We have to sell these chips. We've got to sell them. Right. More like, I have to finish the data sheet.

Dave Jones: Imagine if they sold books like that where they're like, oh, this first page, it's got to be the one, you know.

Davith Roche: Now make this one gold lined. Make this one gold lined, right? And the rest of them can be just, you know, recycled toilet paper. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So who actually writes the data sheets typically in a team like this? You do.

Davith Roche: So the process would go as the systems guy. I'll start off with a system specification, right? So it's like a, imagine a 10, 20, 30 page document, a kind of high level that I would give that I would hand around to customers and they read them and they pull it apart. And I'll give that to the design team as well. And the design team would say, you know what? He's asked for a really fancy volume control here that does zero crossing. And what we mean by zero crossing is that you only change the volume when the signal's crossing zero volts.

Dave Jones: So there's no little click. Yeah, exactly.

Davith Roche: You avoid zipper noise. LAD noise. Zipper noise. That's called zipper noise. Yeah. So.

Dave Jones: Ah, zipper noise.

Davith Roche: So I would say something like that and they would come back with, well, we think we can solve the problem like this. And then at which point I'll go, no, no, no, no, no, no. You missed this thing over here or all that sounds great. And at which point they would write a little bit of how it works, you know, the way they implement it. And that comes back into the system spec, which would eventually become the data sheet.

Dave Jones: Ah, got it. So all those nice little theory of operation stuff in there. Exactly, exactly.

Davith Roche: It's between me and design normally.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Davith Roche: And then it's a case of how much do we, can we, do we want to share of how it works, right? Because we also know the competition's busy reading our data sheets as well.

Dave Jones: Oh, boo.

Davith Roche: I know. Come on.

Dave Jones: Boo this.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We want everything. Don't hide it from us. If you had everything, Dave.

Dave Jones: That means they're reading it too, Dave, right? I mean, that means they're reading their competition. Come on. I know what you're talking about, mate.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they still don't know how they're doing it at the silicon level. Right. Unless you're patented. I mean, but you would patent, if you've got something genuinely new, wouldn't you patent it? And then it's safe, once you've applied for the patent, then it's safe to put it in the data sheet. They can't touch you. Right? Isn't that... You know, Dave... Oh, have I stepped on a hot potato? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Throwing hot potatoes.

Davith Roche: No, no, no. It's actually, it's interesting you say that because there is a school of thought. And, you know, I've heard both ways where I work, right? There's a school of thought that says if you patent something, it becomes public and people can see how you did it. And then innovate. Get around it. Yeah, exactly. And then, yeah. Exactly. In some cases, maybe you're just better off hiding it in the silicon. Nobody knows how you did it. But, you know, you still managed to make it two millimeters smaller, right? Good for you. Patent the back. Sell a million pieces. Thank you very much.

Dave Jones: Got it. But don't large companies like TI sort of, you know, from a real top level value the number of patents that they have? Don't they always apply downward pressure? Look, come up with something innovative so we can patent it because that looks good to our shareholders and whoever, you know?

Davith Roche: There is.

Dave Jones: Or is TI not like that because I know some companies are. They just, you know, patent everything, you know?

Davith Roche: They select. So there's pressure to – so I have my first patent in, you know, the people are looking at them right now. And the patent office, I should say. So there's pressure to do so. There's pressure to innovate, right? Of course there's pressure to innovate. But at the same time, you know, we have committees of people that look through the patents to make sure that they make sense before we even apply for it. So it's not just like, you know –

Speaker ?: No.

Dave Jones: You actually do your due diligence?

Davith Roche: Oh, yeah. No way. Oh, well, no. I'm shocked. Well, you know, we hear horror stories, right, about companies out there that just fire everything at the patent office, right? And, you know, it's like a machine gun, right? Some bullets are going to get killed and the others, you know, you haven't got a chance with. There's a bit more than that, right? So we would have like a design community look at it first and they go, oh, that's been done 10 years ago, mate. Out, right? Or, you know, they'll look at it and they say, actually, you know what? I think this one's got legs on it. You know, go ahead. All right. And then, yeah, so that's generally the kind of stuff that we do.

Dave Jones: Interesting. All right.

Davith Roche: And, you know, a lot of what we do doesn't always – it doesn't always have to be completely innovative either, right? When you're developing a product, it could just be a perfect fit of IP blocks that you had before.

Dave Jones: Of course. Yeah, slap them together, right? How easier is that? Can you – like, I presume you can do that like – yeah, almost like a silicon level. You can go, okay, we've got that amplifier block, we've got this filter block, we've got this block. Can you just whack those together and bam, a chip pops out in a few weeks? Is it that easy or is it –

Speaker ?: No.

Davith Roche: I wish – as a definition engineer, if that was really true, I'd be like – I'd be visiting customers left, right, and center saying, one for you, one for you, and another one for you. It'd be like Oprah, you know?

Dave Jones: But assuming you didn't care too much about the performance and you didn't want to optimize it, could you churn out a rough and ready chip? Yeah, right.

Davith Roche: Yeah, so if it's – the general rule of thumb is that if it's a very digital kind of circuit, then you should be able to move it from one silicon process to another quite easily. And the challenge then is just making sure that they all connect together nicely, right? So they don't end up talking over each other or one locks up the bus when the other one's trying to get on there as well. And there's ways and means around that kind of stuff as well. Yeah. So the analog stuff tends to be very process-specific, which means this dream that we both have here of silicon all – being able to jigsaw puzzle everything together. You really have to have a strategy around a specific silicon process that you're going to say, you know what? For the next five years or ten years or whatever, we are going to try and make all our products in this geometry so that if I ever need an amplifier, I can just borrow the one from over there. And if I ever need an A2D converter, I can borrow it from over there. And we can bodge them all together. And our chances of getting up and running are pretty good.

Dave Jones: But that's a trade-off, though, of ultimately what you can do performance-wise as opposed to versus reusability, right?

Davith Roche: Definitely, definitely. And that's why it's not very common to see ultra-high analog performance along with massive digital density.

Dave Jones: Got it. Of course.

Davith Roche: You know, yeah. Yeah, that's all I can say about that, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh, because it takes so much to combine those two? Yeah, yeah.

Davith Roche: If you think of like the kind of the cutting-edge silicon processes, the 14 nanometer and stuff we hear about Intel playing with and so on.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Davith Roche: You know, those are so new that they may not even have good analog transistors and so on. And, you know, you might want to think about designing silicon very similar to designing, you know, PCBs with components, except most of the components you're given are crap. Right? Transistors are leaky. Capacitors are huge. You know, resistors can drift. And so, you know, as a silicon designer, those guys really have to kind of compensate. They're constantly compensating all the way along. And so, for instance, let's say you've got a resistor that – I'm making up numbers here. But let's say you had a resistor that can go plus or minus 20%, right? And you needed to make some kind of voltage reference. Well, what you might do is take two resistors at the same value. And if they do drift, if it goes from 20K to 24K, well, both resistors at both sides of the resistor ladder, the divider that you're making, they'll both drift up or they'll both drift down.

Dave Jones: Correct. So the ratio is still good.

Davith Roche: The ratio is always good. And so that's the kind of challenge the analog guys are always scratching their heads about. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. One of our guys recently was developing a board. Let's keep it nice and generic here. Developing a board where he was going to use one of the audio converters I worked on recently. And he needed to do some DC measurements with it, right? So audio converters are typically AC specified. Yes. Anything oscillates, we'll handle, right? But anything that's DC, the specs, the devices simply aren't designed or specced for DC. And so this guy had to go off and design basically a discrete version of my audio chip from catalog parts, from some of it from the old Burr Brown stuff, right? Ultra high precision stuff. And he comes to me, he's pulling his hair out. He says, you have no idea how many chips I had to get to do the same thing that's in this audio chip that you guys did. And, you know, I spent like, you know, 25 bucks over here from DigiQ for all these chips. And, you know, the audio version is like three bucks. So it's, you know, it's pretty amazing, you know, when you break it down, what we're able to squeeze in, in the audio chips. And on top of that, you know, that's one of the reasons why we get industrial guys constantly trying to use this stuff for like measurement and so on. Because, yeah, because, you know, it's one tenth of the price, right? But, oh, it doesn't do DC very well.

Dave Jones: Dang it. You mentioned Burr Brown and that's a name which will invoke memories for all the old timers out there. Are they...

Davith Roche: What? Wait, wait, wait. Ready? National. No. No.

Dave Jones: Are they still like the old Burr Brown, you know, old stroking the grey beard guys there? Oh, yes. Yeah, they still call it Burr Brown.

Davith Roche: The Burr Brown is strong with this one.

Speaker ?: Right.

Davith Roche: So, I mean, it's all one big happy family now.

Dave Jones: It's Unitro, damn it.

Davith Roche: Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. It's actually, it's, you know, it's been, what, over 12 years since the Burr Brown acquisition. It's still a name that customers recognize. Yes. But, you know, we're gradually trying to move it to a, you know, a Burr Brown by TI kind of thing, you know.

Dave Jones: 12 years later you're still trying to, marketing is still trying to shake off the... Well, it... It sounds like HP with, you know, Agilent and then Keysight, you know. It takes a decade. It takes a decade or more for these names to, you know, for people to get used to it.

Davith Roche: It's very regional as well, which is what I thought was really interesting. So, the Japanese, ah, the Burr Brown sound, you know, they still love it, right? The Chinese, don't give a crap. I mean, they are just like, you know what, does it hit my spec? Can I get it next week? Can we go to production? Go. And so, it's, you know, it's a night and day. So, yeah, you have to market in different ways for those guys.

Dave Jones: Oh, this is great. But, yes, they're a lot of... Right, so they've still got the old... The old greybeards are still there, stroking there.

Davith Roche: You know, there's fewer of them, to be fair. Right. You know, I mean, you know, let's say you'd been 42 when TI acquired you, you know, you'd be 54 by now, right? Which is getting dangerously close to retirement age for some of these engineers. You know, especially if they live, you know, somewhere like Dallas, which is, you know, cheap to retire in. Oh, okay. They'd be going, hmm, you know, I wouldn't mind putting my feet up and playing with the grandkids a little bit.

Dave Jones: But it is... Yeah, carry on. So, you're actually based in Texas? Yeehaw, yep. Yeehaw! Yep, I've been in Dallas, Texas for nine years now. Right. Is that still where most of TI's action happens?

Davith Roche: Yeah, this is the mothership, you know. Right. Yeah, it's the mothership where all the big decisions are made and where fortunes are gained and fortunes are lost.

Dave Jones: I'm pretty sure this is not... Yes. Pretty sure this is not proprietary, but TI still run their own fabs, don't they?

Davith Roche: Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And it's... I'm pretty sure that's public. I'm sure that's public knowledge. It's definitely a position of strength for us. Right. Definitely. You know, yeah, all my chips are made up in Richardson Fab, which is a fab that opened just a few years ago. And it's, yeah, it's full to the rafters. It's great.

Dave Jones: And what process tech is that? What geometry?

Davith Roche: Yeah, that's going to be difficult for me to share because I've just said all my parts are done up there. Right. Okay. That's cool. But it's... Yeah, I think they're doing all sorts up in Richardson Fab, actually. You know, we've got technology. Some of the stuff the DSP guys were playing with 10 years ago, right? And it finally makes its way to the guys doing analog stuff because all the design kits and stuff are ready and so on, so we can take advantage of it. Got it. Sorry, guys.

Dave Jones: I've got to be careful a little bit. That's all right. So you also do a thing on the side. You do a business on the side making do-it-yourself audio stuff. Expat Audio. Tell us about that.

Davith Roche: So Expat Audio is a small company that me and another expatriate here in the U.S. from the U.K. started basically to fund our own interest on the side. So, you know, I had a hobby, you know, trying to make audio stuff with some of the skills I was learning, developing at TI just, you know, to retrofit my own little recording studio. And, you know, I thought to myself, well, if I'm going to make a PCB run and I only need five of these, then I wonder if I can, you know, sell the other ones to pay for the PCB run. And that's how it starts. And that's how it starts. I mean, it's had a couple of hiccups along the way. It is tough because TI is more than a full-time job. And, you know, a four-year-old running around the house now is another full-time job.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: I've got one of those. Yep. I've got a four-year-old, four-month. Yep. It's great, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. You have all the free time in the world.

Davith Roche: Yeah, maybe after nine o'clock, right? That's it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I got a small space setup. I picked up a pick-and-place machine, a small reflow setup.

Dave Jones: Tell us about that. You got, what, a second-hand pick-and-place machine? Yes. Is this like a real name brand one or is it one of those four-grand eBay cheapies?

Davith Roche: No, no, no, no, no. So, this one was built in 1994. There we go. It runs MS-DOS. Oh, yeah. Now we're talking. And I'm just waiting for it to die.

Dave Jones: It's a real man's pick-and-place machine. Yeah, oh, yeah.

Davith Roche: It's as blind as a bat, right? There's no vision on it. Oh, no vision. Okay. There is. There's a camera, but it's like for the operator to use.

Dave Jones: It's a Polaroid.

Davith Roche: Exactly, exactly, exactly. It's an ECM 93. The guys at ManCorp here in the U.S. ManCorp's a pretty big pick-and-place and manufacturing vendor. They basically take these old machines in. They clean them all up. They put new-ish hard drives in them, something a little bit more stable, and they ship them out. And I've been building with that now for about two years. I wish it was more busy than what it is. The lesson learned about a pick-and-place machine is that unless you're using it at least weekly, there may be better things you could be spending your money on.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Davith Roche: I think like every other kind of hacker, tinkerer, maker that's out there, you don't buy it just because you think you can make a ton of money. You buy it because you want to learn something. Right? I mean, I learned so much about how my customers have to try and – my TI customers, right? The pain that they go through to manufacture just from running on my crappy 48-feeder pick-and-place machine, right? Right, right. And certainly a lot of lessons there. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot of fun.

Dave Jones: So how much did a pick-and-place machine like that cost secondhand?

Davith Roche: So I picked up secondhand, fully refurbished. It was about $8,000.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's fairly typical. Yeah. Yeah, that's not terrible. I mean, like that's about $8,000. No, no.

Davith Roche: Exactly. I mean, you know, it took a lot of – you know, my wife insisted that I give her a presentation to justify why I should buy it.

Dave Jones: A PowerPoint presentation in the kitchen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Davith Roche: She basically told me it should have animated dogs, animations, fly-ins, and animated dogs or something. And I was like, oh, my God. He seriously says, you can't spend this without getting it past me. So the wife's definitely got a sense of humor. That's good.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's great. Yeah.

Davith Roche: Love it. Yeah, no. The expert audio stuff, you know, I started off just doing analog stuff. And then, you know, MSP430 came along. You know, the microcontrollers from TI. And they have these little launchpad kits, very, very similar to Arduino. And so I was like, okay, you know, what do I do? How can I use this? And I started dabbling with remote control stuff, MIDI. And you can, you know, yeah, it's pretty fun to do. You know, the only challenge is that, you know, there's a daytime job that's got to come first.

Dave Jones: Oh, pesky daytime job.

Davith Roche: Yeah, and, you know, the development accounts for those have a little bit more money than I do. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Right, right. You don't have any silicon engineers make a new chip for your designs for expat?

Davith Roche: Do you know, I sometimes dream of that. I sometimes dream of like, you know, I mean, it'd be a miracle if I get an FPGA to work, you know.

Dave Jones: But it's called a foreign order. When you actually get something done at the company through the back door for your own nefarious ends, it's called a foreign order.

Davith Roche: You know, the closest thing to a foreign order I think I could pull off is, you know, if I defined a piece of functionality and I was like, oh, it'd be really awesome if it just did this little thing in the corner kind of thing, you know. Just that, yeah. And actually…

Dave Jones: This customer called Expat Audio said they really want this feature and they'll buy a million chips.

Dave Jones: Right, exactly. We had a… Really, really, really complicated and awesome customer.

Davith Roche: But don't worry, I've got a great relationship with a guy.

Dave Jones: That's right. Right, yeah.

Davith Roche: So, the piece of functionality, we had like a clipping suppression system that we put… I had finished the new ADC and… Or we were finishing it and I said, look, you know, this thing's got a built-in preamplifier on the front end. And, you know, most customers, you know, they just dial it in, right? So, they say, hey, I'm plugging into a cell phone, so I'm going to need to boost the signal up to get it into the ADC. I'll dial it into a certain number and, you know, 6 dB of gain, right? Double the signal, that should be enough. And I said, oh, you know, 4 Pro Audio would be awesome. You know, if it detected clipping, it would turn down the volume just a little bit. Just like that sound guy at the concert venue, right? You know, if the drummer starts getting excited and plays a little hard, it backs off the volume a little bit. And so, we put this feature in and I was like, oh, I sneaked that one past. That's awesome, that is. And then I was busy presenting to a customer like two months later. And they were like, what's this? That's really cool because you can do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, yep, all right, yep. I was thinking about that. That was on purpose.

Dave Jones: Yep, that was fully on purpose. I have your needs in mind, customer. I'm a visionary.

Davith Roche: Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So, it's, yeah, good fortune. That was good fortune.

Dave Jones: It's dogfooding. That's what it is, right? I mean, you're trying out your own stuff. It's dogfooding, yes. You know what you need. That's good.

Davith Roche: Actually, my first boss at TI, when I was in sales, he gave me a small budget to do PCBs and stuff because, you know, his concept was, you know what? You know, you're learning so much by doing that that you can kind of emulate the customer experience. Awesome. Dogfooding, as you said, right? And, yeah, I look back with a lot of respect for that guy because it didn't cost him a lot. It was like 100 bucks a quarter or something. I mean, it was. Oh, yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, in the grand picture of things, not that much. But, you know, I, yeah, what did I do back then? I had an MSP430 and one of those little Nokia displays. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know the old 3310 displays? Yeah. And he said, oh, I've written a driver for it. And I was like, great, I'll borrow that. Thank you very much. And, yeah, it was just the beginning of tinkering and, yeah, pulling systems together. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And now it's a sickness and you bought a pick-and-place machine and, yep, your life's never been changed.

Davith Roche: Yeah, yeah. I've really got to control how the garage is looking now. You know, there's the pick-and-place, the 3D printer, the laser. All I need now is the time to work on it, but preferably in about 25 years. Thank you very much.

Dave Jones: How important are demo boards to customers for parts, you know, for these new parts? Do they absolutely, oh, I'm not going to use this because there's no demo board. No, no. Screw you. I'll go use the competitors.

Davith Roche: You know, that's really interesting. So if you have a hardware-controlled part, so we define a hardware-controlled part as something that you pull this pin high, that below.

Dave Jones: A current source into a resistor, right?

Davith Roche: Yeah, and give it a little bit of power and it just works, right? In many cases, customers will just, you know, they'll take our little reference schematic that's in the data sheet and, you know, wire it up and hit print on their PCBs, no problem. But the second that you start getting higher functionality, you know, where you need, for instance, an I2C port or an SPI port.

Dave Jones: A serial bus to control some internals. And it's got internal registers and stuff like that.

Speaker ?: Yeah, exactly.

Davith Roche: And, you know, let's be frank, right? Those are the most exciting parts because, in my opinion, right? Yeah, yeah. As a product definer, those are the most exciting parts because I could put so many more Easter eggs into that part than I can do with pull-up and pull-down, you know, lines. I mean, pull-up and pull-down lines. I just smack my head against the wall. I'm like, all you want to do is switch from, like, 44.1 to 48K. You know, there's blood smatterings on the wall where I've been hitting my head against the wall, you know, about parts like that. And, you know, yeah. I've been in meetings with customers. I'm pleading with them, please take the I2C stuff and the SPI stuff. I can help. We can do so many more cool things. And, you know, sometimes the occasional customer is like, no, you know, we just need hardware control, mate. That's all we want. That's all we want.

Dave Jones: Pull a pin low. Yeah, exactly. I can understand. Yep. I can understand both sides of the equation. Bells and whistles, Dave. It's all about the bells and whistles. No, it's not. You've got to understand us hardcore hardware guys. Sometimes we just want to pull a pin low and you know it's low, damn it. Right.

Dave Jones: I mean, if you don't, then you're bringing in a firmware guy then. It's like, come on.

Davith Roche: Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to argue with my host. Yeah, I understand that as well. I'm just, you know, there's so many cool things now you can do in parts, you know, if you're willing to take the risk with a little firmware. And when we say risk with a little firmware, you know, I don't think it's just here. I think, you know, all my competitors do this. You know, the GUIs that come with the eval kits now, they help. Oh, yeah. You know, they'll give you the initialization script, right? You just sit there, set it up as if you were, you know, plugging into your old system. And in fact, that's what a lot of customers of mine have done in the past is they take their last generation product. You know, they take the lid off. They desoldered the old part they used and they put our part in through the eval kit. So they'll, you know, blue wire is the term we use. They blue wire it in. Been there, done there. Yeah, yeah. And fire it up, right? And at which point, you know, they can set it up and say, dump these settings, give it to my firmware guy, and, you know, he can implement it for me. And it's done on a regular basis. You know, a lot of these, if you think of the boom boxes that you can buy these days, boom boxes or like it.

Dave Jones: Oh, like the Bluetooth speakers, you mean?

Davith Roche: Yeah, Bluetooth speakers as well. Yeah, I'm thinking more of the old kind of the ones with a CD and a radio and, you know, what we'd call a mini micro combo. Oh, okay. A lot of those come with a very specific, there's like two or three manufacturers that make an SOC that sits in the middle. And this SOC is there to look after the CD drive, you know, the servo and all that kind of thing. It might have an FM tuner, incredibly application specific. And so, you know, a company making a box, making the end equipment will be like, oh, I don't want to write this firmware. You know, I'll get the manufacturer of that cool SOC to do it for me, and I'll tell them what settings I want. Right. Right, and so these guys can take the firmware file and say, hey, you know, Mr. Chinese semiconductor manufacturer who makes DVD SOC type stuff. Here's my settings. Go implement it for me. Nice. And either. Well, you know, it's about distributed engineering resources. How's that? Right. How's that? That's one for the bullshit bingo, right? Oh, yes. But, yeah, so it's, you know, good tools, good EVMs are very important, to summarize, Dave. Good tools, good EVMs are very important for parts where there's some firmware to be done. Or, and this is the one that's always painful, parts which are very high performance where you have to show people. Yes. If you lay out the board like this.

Dave Jones: Example layouts, yes.

Davith Roche: If you're nice to your grounds and so on, then, yeah.

Dave Jones: Here's the performance you're capable of. You can get this on the reference board, and if you don't follow our instructions for layout, you know, for the layout, then you're not going to get the same performance. So don't blame us, you know, like.

Davith Roche: Exactly. Well, you know, it's, you know, in the IT world, you know, they say, have you switched it off and on again? You know, in semiconductors, we say, did you follow the reference design? No. Oh, okay. You know, roll up sleeves.

Dave Jones: So is that like a rule that you'll do reference designs for every analog chip, or is it only where warranted? You go, oh, we just couldn't be bothered with that one. It's not really important.

Davith Roche: It's never a case of we can't be bothered. Right. It's more of a case of. Well said. Thank you very much. I still have my badge tomorrow. I think it's more about, you know, is there one truly required for this device? You know, I think most of the time these days, at least in the organizations that I'm aware of, you know, we try to release an eval device, an eval board for every single device. However, you know, in some cases, you'll have a superset chip that is pin-to-pin compatible with a lower-end chip, or you'll have, you know, footprint compatible. So the first 20 pins are the same, and the lower eight pins, you know, are on the high-end and not on the low-end chip, that kind of thing. And under those conditions, we'll probably release only the high-end one and tell customers, hey, you know what, you know, you can run the high-end chip in this mode, and it'll emulate the low-end chip.

Dave Jones: Sure. And that's fine. We're happy with that, as long as we can get our eval board.

Davith Roche: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's actually, you know, on new devices, it happens almost always. It's old devices where people are like, hey, do you still make that eval kit from 15 years ago? And you're like, good grief.

Dave Jones: You know, I mean, we'll, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Goodness, we haven't even got the CAD files anymore. You know, what you have to do is take the old eval application note, which is a scan copy. Yeah, exactly. And then you have to do toner transfer. We've got the PCB layout in there, and you can flip it over and toner transfer.

Davith Roche: I have seen, you know, TI's known as having a pretty good obsolescence policy, where we only obsolescence when we absolutely have to, right? You know, if the fab is shutting down or, you know, the test equipment can no longer be used or something, then sometimes you have to say, sorry, guys. You know, last buys. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. But, you know, under those, yeah, for some of those parts, right, you know, there may not even be documentation in, you know, in anything other than the scanned PDF format. Yeah. And it's pretty scary, actually. You know, it makes – I do sometimes wonder how these folks – how they managed to develop awesome products like this, you know, before they had, you know, methods of version control and so on. You know, I hear, you know, TI in the UK was one of the first offices that opened outside of the US. And TI was actually one of the first companies to use email.

Dave Jones: Oh, fancy, fancy. Yeah.

Davith Roche: And TI UK had one email address. You'd email this – you know, they'd get the email, right? This is fantastic, right? And the, you know, the assistant for the group or whatever would print it out and put it in someone's letterbox.

Dave Jones: And then type it all back in when they had a response. Yeah, exactly.

Davith Roche: I think it's wonderful. It just tickles me no way to think, you know, cutting-edge technology yet somehow, you know, it's kind of like a – Yeah, yeah. Let's go. We transfer it to speed the light. It's awkward.

Dave Jones: They get it's awkward when there's an office romance with another, you know. Bill, I think I got your mail again.

Dave Jones: This is – your wife loves you very much. It wasn't that long ago I was working at a big military company who would still do everything in triplicate paper form. So if you wanted a purchase order, you had to handwrite the purchase order on the special triplicate paper. Wow. So, you know, each person would get a copy and you'd have to go put it in somebody's, you know, pigeonhole to, you know, the purchasing officer's pigeonhole to, you know, order that part from Farnell's.

Davith Roche: Military guys are crazy though, right? Military guys, you know, have a process in place and thou shalt not deviate from that process. Yes. It's a – you know, it's down – I think a lot of it is down to accountability, right? So if someone ends up ordering the wrong part, let's say you've got a voltage regulator that was 5 volts instead of 3.3 and suddenly the missile arms but doesn't come off the aircraft. You know, dang that 5 volt regulator. Oh, sir, we can't land the plane. Anyway, there we go.

Dave Jones: Do the parachutes have voltage regulators? No idea.

Davith Roche: No idea.

Dave Jones: You mentioned – we were talking – going back, going back, you were talking about boom boxes. Yes. What the hell are those? I'm going back to the 80s here before Chris was born. Yeah. Okay. And all the rage back then, the 80s and the 90s, was that every manufacturer would outdo themselves in, you know, watts. How many watts can you boombox produce? And then they'd come out with the – you know, it was almost like a de facto industry standard term, peak music power output. PMPO. PMPO. How much do you hate PMPO? PMPO has been in my life. Has it changed? What is it? I don't really see many people do it anymore. No. It's like, oh, this is real RMS.

Davith Roche: Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so, so, PMPO was a way – yeah, I remember buying, like, PC speakers and they would say, like, 80 watts PMPO. 80?

Dave Jones: It would be 800 or 8,000 watts peak music power output.

Davith Roche: It was absolute peak. There was some strange calculation for it. Like, you know, if the speakers were 1 ohm, how much power – and they were, you know, so many – I don't know, so sensitive. You know, how much could you theoretically for a split second – if everything melted for that split second running – oh, that's 800 watts, mate.

Dave Jones: And then there was a fudge factor multiplier on top. Yeah. There was some sort of rule of thumb industry fudge factor or something. It was, like, bizarre. No. And everyone was trying to outdo themselves.

Davith Roche: So, these days, the numbers that, you know, people are always trying to push their luck on is how many watts at a percentage of THD, total harmonic –

Dave Jones: At THD, yes. And you'll find that in, like, you know, you get your Sony – buy your Sony amplifier, go home theater receiver, go look at it. They'll actually put in the specs. They'll have – okay, it's 10%. It's – yeah, it's a – we sell it as a 500-watt amplifier, but it's got 10% distortion at 500 watts. If you want 1% distortion, it's only 100 watts.

Davith Roche: In fact – Oh, yeah. I've had Chinese manufacturers – one comes to mind – where they ask what the number would be with 30% distortion.

Dave Jones: 30%? And distortion. So, that's basically a square wave. You know, what was supposed to be a sine wave is now a square wave.

Davith Roche: You know, they didn't ask how hot the chip would get. That was, like, the last thing on their minds. You know, it's like, here I am frying some eggs on top of this darn thing, you know, and – Oh, it's doing just fine, guys. Oh, yeah. 30% distortion. Fabulous. So, yeah. So, you know, actually, the whole THD thing is another audio thing we can kind of – I'd love to, yeah.

Dave Jones: I was going to ask about that as well. Because I've seen – I remember – it wasn't Bob Peace. Maybe it was, like, Paul Rako or something. Someone wrote about it. And just, like, how – there's some really, really low numbers on certain things for THD, right? It can get to, like, 0.0000 whatever.

Dave Jones: I've done and measured stuff at that sort of percentage level.

Dave Jones: Maybe it was Dave who told me this. It's true.

Dave Jones: But over a very small bandwidth. It was over, like, 2kHz bandwidth, you know.

Davith Roche: Well, you know, try finding a loudspeaker that can do that. That's the challenge, right? Exactly. So, you can buy the best DAC in the world. You can buy the best amplifier. But your poor speaker is running at, like, a half a percent or 1% THD. And if you buy cheap, nasty ones, which I love buying because I have short arms and deep pockets, that, you know, yeah, these guys can run for, yeah, 1% if you're lucky.

Dave Jones: And that's not including room acoustics, which is greater than even the crappiest speakers, right? So, you know, to get the performance out of your $20,000 pair of studio reference monitor speakers, you've got to be in a bloody anechoic chamber.

Davith Roche: Yeah, you've got to treat the room. That could be another $20,000 right there. Yeah, of course. They're a funny crowd, the audiophile crowd. I was going to stay away from insulting them, but they're a funny crowd.

Dave Jones: No, they're a bunch of snake oil salesmen, you know. And you can't, that's the thing, right? You can't argue with them because they'll always come back with the argument, have you actually listened to it? You know, have you, it doesn't, you can do all the measurements in the world.

Dave Jones: Have you heard Roger Waters fart on the dark side of the moon? Oh, my God, you haven't lived.

Dave Jones: Dark side of the moon is like the reference. Yeah, right, right.

Dave Jones: I always talk about reference. I mean, like, because there's always, there's always the thing with the phonographs too, or LPs or whatever, you know. And I'm like, but what about the frigging needle? I mean, like, I know, I get it.

Davith Roche: No, that warmth is distortion that they like. It's not, it's not clarity, it's distortion they like. I'm convinced of it. I'm sure somebody is going to start commenting and, you know, poo-pooing everything I say here. But I think it's something to do with the harmonics in the distortion and not the actual, you know, how low is the noise floor and so on. Because the noise floor, the signal to noise ratio on vinyl is, I mean, it's better than cassette, but it's not even as good as CD.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it's, yeah, they just love distortion. And they, but they won't, you know, if you try to do like an A-B comparison with them, it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Davith Roche: Yeah. Right. Dave, it's funny you say the dark side of the moon there, right? So I got a little story to share with you here, right? So I used to be marketing for high power amplifiers. So, you know, we had a 600 watt single chip amplifier. And our sales team down in South America is like, you got to come visit these customers. You know, they do car amplifiers. There's a huge market here in Brazil. You know, come, you know, come, come and, come and visit. This is like 10 years ago, right? And so I head down there and he picks him, picks me up in his bulletproof car. So Sao Paulo in Brazil is pretty scary. I open my laptop to do some work.

Dave Jones: It's a sub junket. Yeah.

Davith Roche: And he slams my laptop shut. He says, you know, we're not stopping at any red lights if you have your laptop with you because people will smash the window and take it. Yeah. It was pretty scary down there. But anyway, so we start driving uphill and anyone who's been to South America, Brazil will tell you if you start driving uphill, get very scared because it's on the hills where all the favelas are. They're really, really poor areas. And anyway, in the middle of this favela, there's a car stereo manufacturer, right? They've got their little production line there. They've got, you know, people, you know, milling cases and extruded aluminum, you know, cases and so on. And so they take me into this little hut, which is the only way I can describe as a hut. Whitewashed walls. You know, the stuff they put on farms? You know, the whitewash.

Davith Roche: Okay. Right. All right. So I'm sitting in there and there's a bench running around in an L shape in front of me and a small coffee table where we have this little meeting. And I'm like, oh, you know, check out this little eval kit. Right. I've got the eval kit with me, Dave. I'm like, you'll analog in, hook it up to your speakers here. 600 watts, thumbs in the air. You know, let's go for it. And, you know, they listen to it. They're, hmm, hi. You know, they're, okay, yeah. I think we like this for our low-end model. I said, low-end model? They go, well, we make something a little bit bigger. Would you like to hear it? Sure, yeah. Sure, right? So these guys hook up this five-kilowatt amplifier. And the speakers, these huge cabinets, they must be like two feet by two feet by four feet. I mean, it looks like a, it's about the size of a huge fish tank. You know, that kind of speaker, right? It's sat underneath the benches and he plugs it in. He switches it on. There's a little thump, tiny. You know, I didn't have my ears up next to the speaker. And, you know, the guy pushes play. And all of a sudden, all I hear is breathe. I think that's from the album you were talking about. You know, breathe, breathe in. Yeah, exactly. It opens up this huge bass. And the walls are shaking, right? There's reels apart falling off shelves, right? And these guys are just sat there with this huge grin on their faces. Like, mine's louder than yours, nanny, nanny, nanny. All I remember is, you know, like reels of parts shaking and then falling off shelves. It was like a small earthquake. It was fantastic. I tell you what, I went home with my tail between my legs that day. Honestly, I was like, you know, you walk in thinking you've got the mutts nuts, right? You know, look at this part. One chip, 600 watts. That's nothing, you know? Right. Oh, well.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's terrific.

Davith Roche: Sorry. Yeah, there's been lots of funny meetings with customers in my time.

Dave Jones: So, we were talking about the comparison, too, about, like, being able to hear that stuff. And I don't know if you guys ever heard it. NPR did a thing a while back. It was actually about compression. But even, like, compression things, like, they were doing, like, 128, 256, 320, lossless. Yep. And, like, you couldn't, I mean, my ears couldn't pick it up.

Dave Jones: In A-B comparisons, you can't. Even the audio fools who claim they can, you know, when you actually put them in a true scientific A-B double-blind comparison test, which they'll never agree to do, but some have, you know, foolishly. And, yeah, they just can't pick it. It's just random, right? They're just full of crap, you know? They think they can hear, you know, up to 25 kilohertz through three walls, you know?

Davith Roche: But it's like, you know, it's just full. I used to believe the same thing, Dave, and especially when you talk about 25 kilohertz. I used to think, you know, that's rubbish, you know? You hear, you know, everyone always tells us, right? As we age, our hearing gets worse and worse. But I've had some of those hearing tests.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, I will agree. Some people are, yes, they are very good. They are very good.

Davith Roche: No, no, but what I was going to say is, you know, you don't hear frequencies up there, but you feel them. So, for instance... At 25K? For me, it's pressure.

Dave Jones: At five kilowatts or what?

Davith Roche: No, no, no, no. For me, when I listen to stuff like that, it's not a pleasant experience, actually. If someone puts a sine wave at 25K, you know, into a pair of headphones for me, you know, something that close to be fair, I feel it as pressure. It feels like someone's, like, trying to put their fingers and push on my eardrums. And so, it's the...

Dave Jones: Well, that's a signal level thing. That's not necessarily a...

Davith Roche: It's at the same levels. It's the same levels. I'm not, like, pumping watts. Really? Yeah. Okay. Believe me, you know, I'm the first to say BS on stuff like this normally. But it's definitely something you experience. It wasn't a pleasant experience.

Dave Jones: See, I've done that. I've had a professional audio test in a little, you know, anechoic booth. You know, you whack the headphones on and they'd shoot your test signals. You had a button at the press when you heard it. And, you know, and, like, they couldn't, you know, I couldn't hear those sorts of things. There's those long silences and you think, should I push the button or not? Actually, I've got a funny story with that, right? They did this. It was part of, like, it was part of a test before I had to work for a company, right? It was part of their medical test, you know, how good you hear it, you know? And so I went in this booth, put the headphones on and they told me, okay, you know, hit the green button when you hear a tone, you know? And I'm sitting there. Nothing's coming through, you know?

Davith Roche: And the guy in the booth is pissing himself laughing, right?

Dave Jones: And, no, they, you know, this went on for, like, five minutes or something and then they came running out and they banged on the glass and they went, are you deaf? Can you hear anything at all? And I just went, what? Did the test start yet? It turns out there was actually, I actually had a faulty pair of headphones that didn't work at all.

Davith Roche: So at the... So they fixed that. At the audio engineering show. That was hilarious. They do them once a year, or engineering show. And there's normally a truck there at this convention on the exhibition floor that you can walk into and, you know, get your hearing tested. And what they're really trying to do and what I think they're trying to do is sell you a pair of, you know, molded earplugs, right? So you can, you know... Of course. You know, no one does this stuff for free, right? So I'm sat in there and, again, same with you, right? You're going, oh, God, it's been, like, 30 seconds since I last heard a tone. Just push the button and hope. And you push the button. And so, you know, I come out of the truck, right? And this lady walks out with a printout. And she goes, oh, oh, I bet you were a bass player in your teens. And I was like, that's spooky. How do you know that? Do you have a crystal ball? Are you, like, psychic? Something strange like that? She goes, no, no, no. Your left ear has got damage right where the crash cymbal is. Right there, right there. I bet that drummer was really happy. And I was like, you know, flashback to my teenage years thinking, you know, if I played in enough bands, girls would like me, you know. And it's like, oh, no. Oh, my God. But somehow, yeah, the damage is very notched, though. It's like at that frequency, there's a huge drop in the graph. Oh, wow. So you don't lose everything above that. You just lose notches. Interesting.

Dave Jones: What if you were a drummer? Did you lose everything then?

Davith Roche: You know what? They didn't have much to start with.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh.

Davith Roche: Come on, we've got to get a drummer joke in, you know? How do you know there's a drummer at the door? How do you know there's a drummer at the door? The knocking gets faster. Nice.

Dave Jones: Yeah, there's like a whole range of jokes about drummers, right?

Davith Roche: Yeah, yeah. They really are the butt of so many jokes. They're like the Irish of the musician world, you know? It's like, you know.

Dave Jones: So have you tried to put, you know, rocks on your, you know, these magic rocks, tape them around your cables to make them sound better? Have you used these bi-directional cables, the cryogenically frozen ones?

Davith Roche: No.

Dave Jones: The ones which have been rubbed by nude virgins with snake oil?

Davith Roche: I'm actually quite happy to use cooker cable for most of my stuff, you know, electric cooker cable. I'm sure there, you know, I'm sure there is some, you know, we, one of the fellows who used to work with us was a fair bit of an audiophile, but, you know, with an engineering background. So I could take a little bit of what he said seriously. And, you know, he used to talk about, you know, with the bi-directional cables, occasionally they'll put a filter at one end and so on so that you don't get, like, impact on so much capacitance on the line and stuff. And you could kind of sit there and go, yeah, I can kind of see what they did there, but I'm not paying $10,000 for this.

Dave Jones: Right?

Davith Roche: I mean, you know. Right. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Even if it does my taxes, I'm not buying that cable.

Davith Roche: You know, there's always people that say you should spend 10% of your budget for your hi-fi system on cables. On cables. Yeah, yeah. And again, I'm sat there and saying, you know, I can completely understand replacing the crappy ones that came with it, right? Because the cables they throw in with it is garbage. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, thin as.

Davith Roche: Garbage, right? But, you know, $10,000 on a pair of speakers and, you know, those rocks and the lacquer or something. I'm just like. The lacquer. Oh, my goodness gracious me. At which point that stuff is a conversation piece for a guy who doesn't have enough to talk about. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, they'll start the evening off with, well, how about them cowboys? And then they'll move on to, have you seen this lacquer? And, you know, that's the depth of the conversation you have, I think.

Dave Jones: What is. Oh, yeah. Have to come and fill my weighted wooden knob that I retrofitted knob that I've put on. Makes it, you know, the bass sound a lot better because I've got a wooden knob. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The volume control, you know.

Dave Jones: What is the lacquer referred to? Sorry.

Davith Roche: So there's this, I think it's something called like C37 or L37 lacquer that they used to talk about like painting it on the knobs or something like that. And somehow it made the system sound better. I mean, you wouldn't believe that. I've heard people talking about like mounting printed circuit boards at 45 degrees so that, you know, the Earth's natural.

Dave Jones: So it emits the right, the right, the really waves or something.

Davith Roche: No, no, no, like so the Earth's natural waves kind of hit it at 90 degrees and don't mess with the electric. You know what? It was one of those things where I was so busy going, what the, that I didn't actually remember the details. I was just too busy going, wow, people are buying this. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Must work for someone.

Davith Roche: Well, you know, like if you're making a $10,000 cable, really, you need to sell five per year, right? And, you know, you've basically got your house paid for. Yeah, you don't have to sell many. You just need five fools. Yeah. To buy your stuff.

Dave Jones: Suckers. That's right. But as I've always said, with this audio file stuff, if you pay $10,000 for a cable or $1,000 for a power cord, you will hear the difference. I can guarantee it. I actually will it. Yeah. I can guarantee you will hear the difference. Right.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because you, you aren't going to admit you've been dude.

Davith Roche: I mean, you know. I can see someone spending $10,000 on a pair of speakers because good speakers, I don't, I wish I owned a pair.

Dave Jones: Good speakers are, yeah. Breathtaking, right? There's a point where it becomes silly, but there is a big step from cheap speakers to good speakers.

Davith Roche: And, you know, the same goes for the DAC. Yeah. The same goes for the amplifier. Oh, true. The supply. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe the cables. But, man, yeah, I mean, yeah. Ooh, a lovely set of speakers will make the hairs in your arms stand on end. And that's quite a religious experience for me. That's like, wow. Still working on getting the wife to approve those speakers. Might take a little while. Did try the, well, it's my job, honey. And the response was, if it's your job, they can bloody well pay for it.

Dave Jones: Pay for it. Exactly. I might. Yeah. Sorry. I'm on her side.

Dave Jones: Well, no, no, no. You got to go with the, it's a business expense. That one's a little bit, a little bit more legit.

Davith Roche: Expert Audio would have to be making that kind of money in the first place. Right, right, right. Step one. Step one.

Dave Jones: So, what is your holy grail speaker? Are you a B&W man? Yeah.

Davith Roche: So, B&W makes some wonderful speakers. They do make some wonderful speakers. I'm not a, you know, I've listened to all sorts. And all I can tell you is, you know, in a lot of the sound rooms I've been taken to, B&W, you know, have definitely been used. I'm trying to think of the other brand. So, I was visiting another customer, oh, it must have been a couple of months ago in Japan, and they made in-car stereo stuff, right? So, they made a replacement two-unit tall car stereo. And this guy was like, oh, you know, you must come and listen to my stereo. It's using your chips. Oh, it's very, very good. And that little two-unit head unit sounded better than any amplifier I've ever heard. It was, I wish I could remember. I think it was one of the old big Japanese companies, kind of, you know, kind of, it wasn't a Sony, but it was like, you know, Mitsubishi or one of these, you know, old industrially type companies that had a division doing automotive amplifiers. And this thing, wow. Just, I was thinking, this thing is like, you know, eight inches across, maybe 10 inch deep, you know. It was a cube, you know. It's like a car stereo, right? The can that you and I probably put into our cars, our first cars, and double the value of the car. But, okay, I mean, this would have done more than double the value of the car. But the lesson I learned very quickly was, you know, it's not necessarily the size of the amplifier or the, you know, you can make a fantastic sounding system in a very, very small space.

Dave Jones: But with audio stuff and audio file gear and everything else, I always say that if you're not doing proper A, B, double blind scientific comparison tests, everything is totally subjective and total psychology. And good luck to you. If you want to spend your, if you want to buy $100,000 Hi-Fi with all these gimmicks and it sounds great to you, well, you know, who am I to argue that it sounds great to you? It's an emotional purchase, right?

Davith Roche: It is an emotional purchase. And for many people, it's a piece of furniture as well, right? You know, it's a conversation piece. Conversation piece, yeah. It's more than just audio. But Dave, one of the things you touched on there, and one of the things I've always struggled with is, I can't think of many people who have an audio memory, right? In other words, you know.

Dave Jones: Yes, that's right.

Davith Roche: If someone shows you a TV and they show, you know, the MPEG compression, you know, that everything's moving except the grass or whatever they said, you can tell one TV to the other. And you could switch off that TV, switch on another one and go, oh, this one's much nicer. But unless there's something seriously wrong with the audio, and when I say seriously wrong, like, there's no bass in one speaker, but there is in the other. It's very, very difficult to have that kind of audio memory.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's certainly there because, like, a lot of your audiophiles, they will have, like, you know, the dark side of the moon, and they've listened to that a million times on the top-of-the-range systems, and they know what it should sound like to them. Yeah, yeah. To them. It's always to them. Yeah, it's perception-based. Yeah, it's perception, but they know what it sounds like to them, so they will be able to pick a shitty system if they hear that song on some other system. They'll be able to pick it. So there is some memory there, but I think you're right. It's not nearly as good as visual memory.

Davith Roche: It's almost like saying, I remember that the bass was good, or I remember the bass should kind of sound like this. It's not actually like an image. You remember the image. With audio, I think it's more like you remember the feeling is the wrong word.

Dave Jones: You remember the emotion of it.

Davith Roche: Yeah, or what you thought at the time of that audio. So, you know, again, it had terrible bass. Something was resonating at some strange frequency and buzzing in the system, right? Oh, I remember that, okay? Well, I played it. After we fixed it, it didn't do that anymore. So, again, it's more of an emotional and kind of a memory. I'm using the wrong words here. All right. Yeah, we know. I think we know. We're circling around the bottom of the hole here.

Dave Jones: So, I have a question actually back to the chip side of things. So, is there, are there like in the app, like I said, I don't have a lot of experience with this stuff, but like on the app note side of things and the implementation of these chips, especially the ones that are doing more and more, you know, so you mentioned that car stereo, the 2U unit that sounded really good. I mean, like, is that more of a choosing lots of good components around it as well? Or are there also implementations of the chips on board, like, you know, layout tips, stuff like that, that have to be followed in order for this kind of stuff to really perform well?

Dave Jones: That's it.

Dave Jones: Is that offered in the...

Dave Jones: Well, the audio there is, layout plays a part in audio. Huge, huge. As somebody who's actually, as I said, I've worked on those, you know, world-leading, you know, lowest THD you could possibly get, analog to digital converters and DACs as well. I guess the stuff you do with the ocean is audio, basically, right? You've got to choose the right kind of taps. Yeah, like sonar. The right kind of caps. You've got to lay that thing out. It's really...

Davith Roche: Yeah, think of it like this, right? The dynamic range that we're talking about with audio is enormous, right? You know, we're talking systems comfortably 115, 120, 130 dB of dynamic range. Now, when you convert that into your voltage domain, right? And let's say the output of your DAC, right? Let's say it was one volt RMS. Okay. Then, you know, for like 130 dB system, you're into the nanovolts range, low nanovolts of noise to get that entire dynamic range, okay? Now, nanovolts of noise, a bad design. Let's say you had a power amplifier next to it. You know, we're making a... Let's make a boombox together here, right? And it's got a digital radio, so you've got a DAC, and you've got a power amplifier. You send that ground current the wrong way past the DAC, and it pushes the ground reference up. That's true. Right. You've just... You know, every time that amplifier is working hard, you're pushing ground up or pulling current down, right? You know, you're sagging the supply and so on. So, you know, good design. So, you know, apps, notes, and things are excellent at showing you how to get one device to work well. Good reference design. TI does a lot of them, right? We have an initiative for reference designs. We'll show you how to get, you know, good performance, almost datasheet performance, you know, from the reference design. In many cases, absolute datasheet performance. But I hate to go emotional with you on this, but, you know, the real master designers, and I've met a few in my time, do some... You know, they worry about the entire system, you know, from the switch mode power supply switching rate, and how that is going to, you know, mess up with the PWM switching rate to the DAC rate. It's almost like they have global knowledge, global knowledge of the signal chain. So they look at the circuit board, and they go, you know, this could mess me up over here. That could mess me up over there. And they work around it. I mean, good audio designers, I find a lot of them in pro audio in my time. So guys doing mixing consoles worry about this stuff night and day. Guys doing broadcast systems, same thing, right? You know, they worry about hum. They worry about crosstalk. You know, they worry about all these other, you know, how can everything else in my system interfere with this one circuit? And then they move on to another part of the circuit and ask the same question. How does everything else mess with this until the whole circuit is complete? It's not to say it's impossible, but it's a wonderful discipline that you get better with as you do more of it. That's the best way I can describe it. It's a real art.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, there was a really good – I think it was actually Hank, who we've had on the show before, Hank Zumbelan, who wrote a really good – it was just about ADC stuff. But I remember that was an app note that just kind of really messed me up because it kind of like pointed out all those things that I was missing, you know? Yeah. And then, like you said, it wasn't just for one chip. It was like, you know, I was putting like four ADCs on a board. And then, okay, well, now where do you center your grounds? And, you know, where do you have return current, stuff like that? It can be – that system stuff is nasty.

Davith Roche: You know, the guru on that stuff, which multiple folks I've worked with have mentioned his name. And I've gone and bought one of his books as well. It's a guy called Henry Ott. You may have had him on the show before. Ah, yes. We have had him on the show, yeah. I mean, this guy's the guru. Just this – you know. But before I read his books, you know, people were saying, oh, you know, dealing with converters, you've got to have separate grounds for your analog and your digital and never the twain shall meet other than in a small resistor underneath the converter and all this kind of stuff. And Henry Ott just comes along and says, you know what, just understand where your return currents are going and partition your system sensibly. So, you know, keep your sensitive analog away from that clock line that's coming from, you know, from your speed if interface or whatever. Just, you know, smart system partitioning will do you better than trying to do these islands of grounds everywhere.

Dave Jones: Right. I have one last question because it kind of relates to this with layout and stuff as well. So, is there – I mean, so you mentioned the trends are changing for integrations and silicon and everything kind of getting kind of mushed together. But is there an impact to the package shrinking because that's kind of the – I mean, package technologies all seem to be going the same way as well, like smaller and smaller and smaller?

Davith Roche: You know, there's – it depends what you're going into, right? So, if you intend for your product to go into a very mobile product, then the world is definitely moving towards very tight geometry stuff. You know, what we would call a wafer scale – wafer chip scale packaging, which is basically, you know, they take the die, they cut it up, they put balls underneath and off you go and solder it. And, you know, if you're doing that kind of stuff, you know, unless you're a master technician, that's really beyond the realms of what the kinds of products that we're talking about really. You know, as in to be able to do it, you know, on a small scale, to be able to solder it, you know, on a small, simple reflow system and so on. It really is the stuff of, you know, high-end experts. However, outside of that space, you know, if you look at what goes into, you know, your TV or your setup box or maybe even your games console or your guitar amplifier or something, that stuff's still really hanging out in TSOP packages, thin SSOP packages, some QFP. And, you know, very recently starting to look at things like QFN. And ideally, you know, even from a factory perspective, I think, you know, yeah, I think I personally then, I'll say from, I personally still prefer the old TSOPs and QFPs. Oh, I love TSOPs.

Dave Jones: That's how I see it for me.

Davith Roche: Oh, you youngster. No, no. I was about to say, you want dips next to you, Dave. You know, it's, yeah, yeah. Just, you know, just, yeah. Just imagine, like, the last chip I did was a 30-pin TSOP. I'm thinking how big that bugger would be in a PDIT package. That would just be enormous. I mean, you know, I'm wondering if, you know, like when you go to some concerts, if the venue is big enough.

Dave Jones: Like they don't Z80.

Davith Roche: But, you know, you go to a concert, right, and, you know, the music sounds funny because it takes so long for the music to get from the stage all the way to where you are back at the nosebleeds, you know. It'd be that kind of effect, but across the chip. You know, the music's coming in at one end, and, you know, by the time it's got to the end, there's a natural delay in the system.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but, you know, that really adds to the warmth and distortion. Exactly. You can charge a lot more for those systems. I'm just saying.

Davith Roche: I'll tell you what, then we'll make a special PDIT version for your record player. That's right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: You can do point-to-point if you like. Just quickly, because we're almost practically out of time. You mentioned the wafer scale chip packaging, which is basically a bare die. Now, I've done a video on this, and it's well known, that bare dies can be photosensitive. Is that an issue with analog parts? We know it's, you know, like there's, I think it might have been a Texas Instruments converter on the Raspberry Pi that was photosensitive. Oh, it was the Xenon flash thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you flash it with a camera flash, which, you know, a high-intensity Xenon strobe flash, there'd be so many photons hitting that chip that would, you know, it would actually, the DC-to-DC converter locked up.

Davith Roche: Yeah, actually, I saw that. I saw that video, Dave, and I'm not sure if it was the TI part. No, no, no, no. It may have been somebody else. Sorry. What I can say is, I believe that, how do I say this properly? I think that was an error on the manufacturer's behalf and not something you should say all devices act like this. Because if that was, if that was, all WCSP devices, I don't think it's a weakness. I really don't. I mean, most of the time, it's, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, no, it's a potential weakness because they're effectively an exposed dock.

Davith Roche: Well, they're passivated as well, normally. I mean, they go through an extra couple of steps. It's not bare, bare, die, where you're like, don't put your finger on it. The grease leak through the... You know, it's not quite that bad.

Dave Jones: Okay, so they're passivated. But they are, by definition, photos can potentially be photosensitive.

Dave Jones: They got less crap around them.

Davith Roche: They do have less crap around them, yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: And that's what I'm asking. Like, you know, has that ever been a problem on audio? I've never heard of a problem. Never heard of it.

Davith Roche: Yes, and we've shipped billions of parts like that. Well, not billions, millions of parts like that. And, you know, the quality guys have never come to me.

Dave Jones: I certainly didn't expect it to be. Yeah, no, I didn't expect it to be. I just thought if there was some obscure. Yep. No? Okay, good.

Davith Roche: Yeah, I mean, you know, stray grounds and things are normally the things that get, you know, devices. And that could be a TSOP or a WCSP. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a layout. Right, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So what is the future of Expat? I mean, are you guys still making new products?

Speaker ?: Future of Expat?

Davith Roche: When and where possible. I gotcha. Really looking at remote control of analog. So, you know, it's... Oh, cool. You know, we see analog effects processing definitely is something that's coming back or something that continues to hold a thrill for a lot of people. You know, a lot of folks move to what we call like plugins, VST plugins, where, you know, it's, you know, if you want a $2,000 audio compressor sound, right, you buy the plugin and then you could use it on every single track in your system, right? You know, the scalability was incredible. But there's a lot of folks who still hold on to this old sounding system, but they've gotten used to the wonderful recall capability that's in their computer. So, you know, you can fire up your computer a week later, push a button and all the settings come back, right? And with old analog technology, you can't do that today.

Dave Jones: You put marks on the dials. That's what you do. You put a little piece of tape and you put them on the mark. Yeah, a mark again.

Davith Roche: So my mom was a BBC studio technician, studio technician for the BBC back in the 70s. And, you know, she had to make sure that everything was running smoothly with, you know, all the systems like this. And they actually used to have interns that would run around with a photograph, a paper line drawing of the equipment. And they would mark where the knobs were at the end of the session. And then, you know, before that musician came back in, you know, two weeks later to finish the song, this poor little guy would be like, flipping through pages going, oh, channel one was, you know, 10 o'clock for this knob, three o'clock for that one. You know, trying to get it all right. It sounded the same, right? I mean, talk about painful. I mean, yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: And if it drifted in the meantime, if you had a cold snap, it was screwed anyways.

Davith Roche: Well, I think most of that stuff was just left on permanently, right? And, you know, somebody else was footing the electricity bill. Because those big old mixing consoles are power hungry. I mean, they're huge power supplies. So you don't let those things cool down.

Dave Jones: But I've got one of those for teardown. It's two meters long.

Davith Roche: It's bigger than my workbench. Who makes it? You've got to tell me. Is it like SSL or Mii? It's a Yamaha. Oh, the big Yamaha. I think it's a Yamaha. I saw you. You actually had the small Yamaha that you did a teardown of as well, right? I think I saw that one.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. That was ages ago. Yeah, but no, I've got it. It can't fit in my lab here. I can't bring it in the lift. It won't fit in the lift to get up here. So I've got it. It's down in my bunker. So it's like two meters long.

Davith Roche: You've got to stick the lights down to the garage, you know, the parking garage, right? Yeah, yeah. To the teardown there.

Dave Jones: To do the teardown.

Davith Roche: Whatever you do.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right. And as you said, they're so power hungry. It doesn't have a power supply built in. It has come with a 19-inch rack, which I don't have, 19-inch rack power supply to power the

Davith Roche: And normally that would be in a separate room, right? So in a recording studio, they would move that to the machine room where everything goes click and clack, right? Yeah. Commissioning those consoles is an art in itself. The guy I work with at Expat Audio, his previous role was looking after a media college in the U.S. where they have 100 mixing studios. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Davith Roche: And they'd have guys once a month going through pushing every button on the console because there could be a 48-channel console, 15 switches per channel, and a chance that one of those switches would fail. So when you did the math, it was like one will fail every month.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Davith Roche: So yeah. Bring out the intern again, right? He's not drawing pictures anymore, but he's like, channel one, switch one. Channel one, switch two. My finger hurts, sir. I've got Nintendo thumb. Yeah. Anyway. Oh, wow. So I think, yeah, I think we've been through a lot of time there. I'm sorry if it was a little...

Dave Jones: No, that's okay. We always go over to...

Davith Roche: Well, you're going to have a lot of editing to say, that was crap, that was crap, that was funny, that was crap. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Editing.

Dave Jones: What do you think this is? No.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much for joining us. Where can people follow you? Are you a Twitter man? Are you on Twitter? And all that sort of jazz.

Davith Roche: Yes. I'm on Twitter, at Expat Audio. Expat Audio also has a Facebook page that's much more active than our Twitter. Boo.

Dave Jones: We hate Facebook. Oh, really? I'm so sorry, guys.

Davith Roche: But really, the place I encourage folks who have audio questions to come and hang out is at TI's E2E Forum. It is manned by real human beings.

Dave Jones: He's a company man through and through.

Davith Roche: We've seen what it's done for us and how many more customers we can help with it. It's awesome. Yeah. It's really good.

Dave Jones: And there's requirements on FAEs to help out there and everything, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Our internal factory guys are on there.

Davith Roche: And the nicest thing, which we thought we wouldn't see in audio, is customers are starting to help each other as well.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's great.

Dave Jones: And that's what foreign communities do. Once you set it up, you'll find that they'll just help each other. You won't have to do it anymore. They'll just... Somebody will answer somebody else's question before your FAEs can get it. They'll just come in and answer it. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's how forums work.

Davith Roche: So it's a real gift. Previously, before that, it was all by email through our field application guys. And it's a very different story. So, yeah, come on over to TI.com, ETE.TI.com. And it's, you know, come tell us how we can help you with your products. Spoken like a true company man.

Dave Jones: Oh, that was... That was just gold. Someone's getting a raise this year.

Davith Roche: Someone's getting a raise. It's going to take a lot more than that, Chris. No.

Dave Jones: Just tell them that you need to buy that set of speakers and, you know, maybe they'll give in, you know. Dual for fun plus, you know, bonus.

Davith Roche: I hear the words to when you wish upon a star. But it's... Thank you very much for having me on the show, guys. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it was great having you. I'm excited to hear it. Thanks, mate. It's been awesome. Yeah. There we go. Oh, by the way, there's also... You may want to add this later, Chris. I also have a Reddit thread up on Nice Chips for the new ADC that I finished. Oh, cool. And it's just a real opportunity for folks to come and ask questions like, why did you do that? You know, how does that work? And that kind of thing. It's... And what's the name of that chip? That's the PCM186X family. They're a bunch of 3.3 volt high performance ADCs.

Dave Jones: Awesome. We will definitely show people.

Davith Roche: I appreciate that. Cool. It's a passion. Well, thanks again. Thank you, guys. You have a good evening. All right. Take care. Thanks, mate. See ya. See ya.

Davith Roche: See ya.

Speaker ?: See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya.

Chris Gammell: See ya. At doing this. So, uh, yeah. I would start searching. Maybe get some people off of a comment board or forum or something like that.

Dave Jones: I'll do that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I would recommend it. Amen.