Some news here – after a little more than a year with DropLabs, earlier this month I was fortunate to accept a position with Amazon’s Lab126 division, working on audio products’ audio architecture engineering. I’ll be relocating to the Seattle area, and working out of one of Amazon’s Bellevue offices, just after Christmas this year. Family-wise, we are looking forward to getting back to the Pacific Northwest, just across the border from my family in Vancouver Canada. I’ve been with my new team for only a short time, and already I can see great teamwork and great team members to work with.

I’m very proud of my time at DropLabs. Besides working on some patented technology, and re-engineering the transducers, I also rewrote with the firmware team the audio pipeline code, and worked on various technology investigations, all with a great team of people. The team held together against all odds during this pandemic year, to relaunch a re-engineered product in the fall, without being able to travel to manage prototype runs in China in person. DropLabs has a great product and technology, and it was my great privilege to work on something so different from what I have worked on previously.

I attended the NAMM Show, a professional audio for musicians and creators, for the first time, on 18 and 19 January 2020. I went with Droplabs to staff our booth, and also to see some of the show. This was my first time to the show, and I was completely impressed by the size of the venue and the number of different companies fully represented. We had an overwhelmingly good reception at our booth, so we were quite busy the two days I was there. I made a lot of connections with musicians and met folks in this part of the industry, which I’d never touched before. It was a great pleasure to attend.

Highlight of the show: meeting Donald Patterson, who was really into our tech, and later brought by Janice Marie Johnson of A Taste of Honey, who was herself a joyous riot to meet.

Last month, after 2 years with Goertek, I moved to work for a startup company based in Echo Park, Los Angeles, just off of Sunset Blvd., by the name of DropLabs.  I made the move for several complementary reasons:

• I wanted to get back to working on products I could stand behind, from a brand and technical perspective, which isn’t easy to do as a supplier.
• I wanted to work on an audio product of a kind that is different than anything I’ve seen before, which presents high-level challenges and innovation opportunities I know I will enjoy diving into.
• I wanted to work on technology that will bring music into people’s lives in an all-new way, but also technology that has the promise of helping people live better lives.  Being able to develop products which can help people is something I’ve never done before.

The team is small and full of energy, and I know the CEO from a long time ago, so felt comfortable stepping into this new role (and moving my family out of the SF Bay Area to Los Angeles).  They’ve been working hard on the first product, which has just launched publicly this week (which is why I didn’t post anything here about my career change until now).  I’m hard at work studying how to approach the next products on our roadmap.

Our plan is to relocate down to the Los Angeles area right around Christmastime.  Until then, I’ll be on the road to the Los Angeles office for a couple of days each week.

I of course valued all my time at Goertek, and learned a lot from the experience, both technically and about myself, and worked with a great bunch of people there.  This was just an opportunity that felt tailor-made for me.

Last week I was happy to join many old friends, colleagues, and fellow engineers and researchers at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York City, held at the Javits Center.  It was my first time attending a convention at the Javits Center, which is a great facility in midtown Manhattan, relatively close to the Empire State Building.

I was honoured to be asked to participate on a panel for the workshop on the topic of  Loudspeaker Life Testing and Power Amplifier Requirements, with several other experts.  I presented some material which I titled “Transducers Fail…Eventually”, which had to do with fatigue based failures for transducers in reliability testing, and in the field.  The discussion in the workshop was fantastic, and I’ve been invited back for the next AES convention, in Dublin.

I spoke the 2017 COMSOL Conference in Boston MA USA on October 5th, with a talk titled Designing Durable Audio Transducers.  This was my last official act as a member of the Sonos team.  The COMSOL blog post is located here.  For me, the experience of going to the COMSOL Conference was a blast; I learned a lot from the other exhibitors, the hosts were welcoming and helpful, and I’d be happy to attend again, sometime in the future.