Sound Motion™ Development Hardware

Working for both Mayht and Sonos I was responsible for the custom electronics required to develop Sound Motion™ prototypes, build demo speakers, build proof of concept speakers with clients and test and verify the above.

In the images above we see:

• The insides of the “Amp Box”, the standard solution I built for powering the prototypes. It has a Bluetooth module for easy playback, a digital signal processor for tuning the system, an STM32 MCU to control these, a single channel 230W power amplifier, and a stereo channel 30W to power mids and tweeters.

• The hardware for an “Infinite Motion” concept we did together with Powerfoyle, which had a ridiculously power efficient woofer inside. It runs on 18650 batteries, and has a high efficiency boost converter, powering a high efficiency class D amplifier, powering the high efficiency woofer (and a regular full range driver). The boost converter output could be switched, to lower the idle losses at lower volumes.

• The front panel for a stroboscope based oscillation analyzer I came up with. It’s both a 230W sine wave generator, as well as a 100W LED strobe generator. You can specify how much these are in- or out of sync. With this we could visualize any frequency oscillation (between 20 Hz and 600Hz) at a frequency of choice (between 0.1 Hz and 2 Hz). I let myself go on the woodwork a bit in my spare time. :)

Besides the electronics engineering I had a lot of fun working in acoustics here as well. I’ve been building speakers since I was a kid, and felt right at home also being allowed to puzzle on the audio and DSP side of all the prototypes and proof of concepts we built.