Are you interested in Audio Electronics?

Are you interested in Audio Electronics? There’s a magazine for that! …and a website! …and a weekly newsletter! audioXpress magazine, audioXpress.com and The Audio Voice newsletter is the solution for all your audio needs!

Data glasses present data to the user’s eyes by means of a small display. Unfortunately, the display and associated drive circuitry consume a fair amount of power, so battery life is limited. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology (FEP) in Germany have developed an energy-efficient OLED display for this sort of application, which cuts power consumption to a fraction of what current displays require.

Searching for a powerful gong or audio notifier? The "Card Sound" board presented here consists of a TDA7266 audio amplifier featuring two 7-watt outputs, a CS4344 AD converter, an STM32F401 ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller and a slot for a micro SD card. The goal is to play different (high-quality) sounds stored on an SD card with enough volume to wake up even the deepest sleeper.

Some people would like to listen to a 5+1 surround audio system, but don't want to give up their stereo system. However, both systems in one room would require eight speakers, which is too much for many and also not necessary. Since both systems have speakers for the left and right channels the idea was born to build a switch box which allows configuring the system as 5+1 or as stereo while only requiring the 5+1 system's speakers.

Audio specialist Jan Didden, well known for various audio projects in Elektor and his own publication Linear Audio, has developed a special power supply module designed to supply clean power to high-end analog and digital audio circuits. According to the designer, the SilentSwitcher module is line voltage independent and produces little noise or RFI, and its power dissipation is virtually zero.

Nowadays it looks like we’re all listening to music from compressed files. Spotify and the like are of course easy and convenient, but surely you miss the authentic details? From where we sit, it looks like the number of people who are truly interested in top-end audio and are willing to pay what it takes can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Why is that?

For a change this review is not about test equipment or a development board, but instead a practical test of a Kodi media player, based on the Raspberry Pi 3, which has been a popular item in the Elector Store for a good while already. Does this kit really provide value for money, and is the Kodi media player actually as convenient and good as everyone claims?

Control your various DMX fixtures using a PC with USB interface and the included "DMX Light Player" software!  Write your own software with the provided DLL. Test your gear with the stand alone test function which outputs all 512 channels at a time, with adjustable levels. This interface is supplied as an easy to assemble kit.

Many people today use earbuds to listen to music while participating in sports such as cycling or jogging. However, earbuds are sometimes inconvenient and they often tend to fall out. S-tone sports glasses, a project presently collecting pledges on Kickstarter, put an end to these problems.

When examining overload recovery in AC-coupled amplifiers or when testing the attack/release behavior of audio compressors, well-defined tone bursts come in really handy. This simple circuit accepts a steady tone from an ordinary audio oscillator at its input, and produces bursts at its output. The duration of the burst as well as their repetition rate are variable from less than a millisecond to several seconds. The amplitude and switching point are, of course, also adjustable.