Supply chain issues are a familiar problem for product-oriented and manufacturing businesses and the last two years have shown how extensive the consequences of any disruptions can be. For most consumers, the semiconductor shortage was the most visible sign of the market interdependency problems, where natural disasters in one country can cause ripple effects all over the world. The effects of the global pandemic have thrown a powerful combination of multiple, consecutive disruptions that are causing long-lasting shortages in the most unsuspected places.

Over the last two years, the audio industry has felt the direct effects of those disruptions in the supply chain across all its market and product segments. While "chip shortages" have been extensively debated in mainstream media, a much less visible shortage of apparently non-critical electronic components is actually causing wider-reaching problems for all manufacturers who have been unable to meet demands, some even forced to stop production completely while implementing product redesigns to offset those challenges. And after two years, audio manufacturers - as in many other industries - have transitioned from just-in-time and build-to-order strategies, to design for availability.

More recently, the cumulative effects of lockdowns and geopolitical tensions have caused even more strain over the supply of raw materials, directly reflected in escalating costs for aluminum, neodymium, and even more common materials such as steel and nickel. Adding the escalating transportation costs and shipping delays generates a perfect storm that is causing a complete rethink of non-essential product production. And I would like to highlight how manufacturing and logistical challenges are causing despair among many startups and entrepreneurs dreaming about new product categories and brand strategies - including the thousands of innovative crowdfunding campaigns in the electronics space that have suddenly become not viable and impossible to execute.

The global supply chain was already feeling all the severe effects of two years of pandemic, when the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions imposed on Russia further impacted the supply of raw materials, and many important parts and components. It's a known fact that both Ukraine and Russia are important suppliers of raw materials, particularly steel and aluminum, but also many critical parts and components for the electronic industry. But the scale of the impact on vacuum tube production seems to be much larger than we could imagine.

In this article, authors Christian Bellmann and Ruben Hauschild (Klippel GmbH), and Mattia Cobianchi (Bowers & Wilkins) share their research on new requirements for the measurement of in-wall installation speakers. The directional characteristics are an especially important factor, because the direction in which a loudspeaker emits sound highly affects the interaction with the listening room and the listening experience. The authors' research addressed the requirement using holographic directivity to address the way the directional characteristics interact with the listening room. This article details how Kippel’s holographic measurement approach for directivity testing provides comprehensive, easy-to-interpret data that is relevant for transducer engineers as well as audio system designers. This article was originally published in audioXpress, December 2021.  Read the Full Article Now Available Here

James Croft (Croft Acoustical) discusses a patent awarded to Daniel Beer (Martinroda) on behalf of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. (Munich, Germany), describing an invention that promises to successfully process an audio signal to focus an acoustic signal by an arrangement of a plurality of loudspeakers, comprising a frequency analyzer, a signal processor, and a signal output interface. The acoustic signal is based on the audio signal. The frequency analyzer is configured to determine a fundamental frequency in a frequency spectrum of the audio signal depending on a geometry parameter of the arrangement of the plurality of loudspeakers. The signal processor is configured to adapt an overtone of the fundamental frequency to obtain the processed audio signal and the signal output interface is configured to output the processed audio signal to the plurality of loudspeakers. As James Croft states, this approach can work quite well, even though there are well-known drawbacks that the patent intends to resolve. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, April 2016. Read the Full Article Now Available Here