A bit about your host....

[JP]

After many years in large companies, I once went to work for a small, closely-held company with less than 100 employees. The employees were generally pretty good, but the management was a misogynistic dumpster fire. Oh yeah, most of the employees were women. I don't know if a real HR team would have been able to solve that, but without it, the company had a steady revolving door of employees who got tired of the bullsh*t. The firm did not have an HR team, but they did have a notable set of outside lawyers.

If HR departments exist to protect the company and its incompetencies from liabilities, those incompetencies and liabilities don't stop at the Fortune 500 line.

I'm sure they would've relieved some of the burden from the lawyers.

 

[Katji]

I didn't know this had become a long thread. Apparently I read the first part years ago, but maybe I was not quite awake, because I had not remembered that Amir was a programmer, and C and UNIX. So now I read the entire thread and what got me to reply was what @LTig said about refactoring and functions and so on. I did a lot of that, and "working late" would be an understatement, but I had to do it night because I couldn't do it during the day, and I had to do it because I had to maintain those programs. Which was all stressful but then they became maintainable. Never mind engineers and programmers' job titles, and whatever formal qualifications they had.

 

[Koeitje]

Cough, cough, Shockley, cough, cough.

Anecdote: Up until about three years ago, I worked at a mega-corp after spending most of my career as an entrepreneur and business owner. That seems odd, but their structure was one of highly autonomous business units, so as long as we hit our numbers, the BU management (GM, commercial manager, and me) were left strictly alone. For my first five years there, it was a great gig. The GM and I hit it off immediately- I had been scheduled for a day of interviews, but a half hour into breakfast, he told me, "You're getting the offer." The three of us ran the thing the way we wanted, had terrific success in getting innovative products out and pulling in top drawer revenue and profit growth.

Several years passed, and some bright corporate boys eventually came along and tut-tutted about waste and duplication; "Why have separate purchasing, HR, management, and other support functions duplicated between business units? Let's centralize this!" They fired the GM and commercial manager, fired our purchasing and HR folks, and rolled all those functions in with an entire division. This is when I started sending out my resumé... In any case, I had one clash after another with HR. They were VERY upset that I went and did hiring my way, and even more upset (though this was unspoken) that my hiring track record was one of the best in the corporation. A particular sticking point was that my focuses were subject-matter competence and reaction to stress instead of the soft-skill stuff they valued.

Eventually, the edict came down: I was not allowed to conduct job interviews for hires to my staff. Any candidates would be interviewed by HR, with me sitting in and not being allowed to say anything. After dealing with me screaming, yelling, and firing off complaint letters to corporate management, they generously and grudgingly permitted me to have five minutes at the end of the interview to ask one or two questions.

Our first interview, this for a staff chemist position, the HR folks asked every stereotypical question you could imagine. "Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult colleague." "What was an example of a failure you had and how did you correct it?" That sort of crap. After sitting through 55 minutes of this drivel, and the HR people being delighted by the candidate's canned and prepared responses to the canned and prepared questions, it was finally my turn for the last 5 minutes. I asked one question. "You make a 0.05 molar solution of phosphoric acid. What's the pH?" Freshman chem. The candidate looked highly uncomfortable, hemmed and hawed, and finally couldn't answer it.

In the post interview meeting, I was ungenerous enough to point out that I could have saved the company a lot of time and expensive staff with an interview that would have only been me and would have lasted 5 minutes. This was not what they wanted to hear, and I was excluded entirely from any further interviews. A year later, I was gone, and the formerly profitable and rapidly growing BU went under.

HR departments are cancer.

Sounds like the exact opposite of the interview I had at the place I work now. Had an interview with my future manager and someone from HR. The HR person only asked two questions in the entire interview, the rest was actual talk with my future manager about skills and projects I had done.

 

[SIY]

Sounds like the exact opposite of the interview I had at the place I work now. Had an interview with my future and someone from HR. The HR person only asked two questions in the entire interview, the rest was actual talk with my future manager about skills and projects I had done.

Far more sane!

 

[simbloke]

One of the reasons I got out of the corporate R&D world and we bought a coffeeshop/café in the rurals.

Of course, I'm about to jump from frying pan to fire: I just took a research position with our local university, where I'll get to deal with a lot of kids...

I worked in a university for 25 years (technical, not a lecturer). Almost always the students will be no trouble at all, it's the other kids you have to worry about!

 

[SIY]

I worked in a university for 25 years (technical, not a lecturer). Almost always the students will be no trouble at all, it's the other kids you have to worry about!

Yeah, it’s been ok so far. It took a while before they could figure me out, but once they did, they’ve been great to work with.

 

[PhilDaintree]

WOW!!! Fantastic that you lend this amazing depth of knowledge to us - especially as forums like this can descend into uglyness and you rise unflustered above it or hopefully don't even read it! I am learning so much from you and the experts here. Thank you

 

[JSmith]

This is an excellent and engaging interview of @amirm by @jtwrace at The Intelligent People Podcast and worth a complete watch for those reading this thread;

JSmith

 

[ozlegend]

So what does this all mean? Well, it means that I am very familiar with many aspects of the systems we talk about. I am comfortable talking about networking and streaming one minute, and good power supply design the next. Hey, we could even talk about patents, business aspects, etc.

Having just joined the forum it was great to read such a comprehensive (even exhausting!) CV of its founder and owner - extremely impressive and reassuring.
If you are ever desperate to talk about patents I was briefly a Patent Examiner at IP Australia (most boring job I ever had) but fortunately was transferred to their policy area where I helped co-author a major Australian Government enquiry on "Intellectual Property and Competition" and later helped enact the first legislation giving an explicit Patent Experimental Use exception.
If you are even more desperate and want to talk about "business aspects" I did a 2-year MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management so am pretty good at MBA-speak too!
But my real love is and always has been physics & materials science for its application to music reproduction with the aim of "like being there" at the recorded event. Hopefully this forum should help further this aim.

 

[j_j]

But my real love is and always has been physics & materials science for its application to music reproduction with the aim of "like being there" at the recorded event. Hopefully this forum should help further this aim.

Welcome from me as well! I find myself often citing physics or mathematics when confronted with interesting audiophile claims. And of course "like being there" is something made really hard by physics, but maybe by studying what one can and can not hear, there's some hope.

 

[delta76]

The internet always finds a reason to complain. BTW, that a really broad range of skills you have.

Six years too late, but you are completely right.
When i tried to say that given amir's profile i would trust him over any self claimed fb expert, some random guy still insisted that he would not take any guy listen to one speaker instead of two seriously.

Then I realized why bother

 

[NoxMorbis]

Thank you Damien. I have been fortunate in my career in landing those opportunities and working with great teams.

Lots of brain power didn't hurt, either

 

[AdamG]

Lots of brain power didn't hurt, either

Brain power is like muscle. You build it up over years of exercise and commitment. Every brain has the potential, you just have to hit the mental gym on a regular basis.

 

[NoxMorbis]

Brain power is like muscle. You build it up over years of exercise and commitment. Every brain has the potential, you just have to hit the mental gym on a regular basis.

I disagree with that assessment of human IQ. It's quite obvious that, like physical attributes, some people are better at intellectual endeavors than others, and no matter how hard one tries, one will never rise to superior levels becasue of the innate limitations. Surely, we can increase our performance by exercising, but so can those with superior intellects.

 

[Angsty]

I disagree with that assessment of human IQ. It's quite obvious that, like physical attributes, some people are better at intellectual endeavors than others, and no matter how hard one tries, one will never rise to superior levels becasue of the innate limitations. Surely, we can increase our performance by exercising, but so can those with superior intellects.

What, exactly, are "intellectual endeavors"?

 

[NoxMorbis]

What, exactly, are "intellectual endeavors"?

Intellectual: appealing to or engaging the intellect
Endeavors: to attempt by exertion of effort
For example: How capable your brain is at processing information.

 

[NoxMorbis]

Having just joined the forum it was great to read such a comprehensive (even exhausting!) CV of its founder and owner - extremely impressive and reassuring.
If you are ever desperate to talk about patents I was briefly a Patent Examiner at IP Australia (most boring job I ever had) but fortunately was transferred to their policy area where I helped co-author a major Australian Government enquiry on "Intellectual Property and Competition" and later helped enact the first legislation giving an explicit Patent Experimental Use exception.
If you are even more desperate and want to talk about "business aspects" I did a 2-year MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management so am pretty good at MBA-speak too!
But my real love is and always has been physics & materials science for its application to music reproduction with the aim of "like being there" at the recorded event. Hopefully this forum should help further this aim.

Smart people are my heroes.

 

[Idrago]

This is a bit about your host, Amir Majidimehr. I am writing this as to give more context to people reading my technical reviews and measurements. I have realized that without this context, many assume I am yet another blogger spitting out graphs. That is very true but let’s see if we can confuse them with an alternate reality!

Without giving away my exact age, I grew up in 1960s with analog electronics as my primary hobby. Learned that from my oldest brother who likewise had the same hobby and spent his nights and days designing electronics. This gave me an intuition for analog electronics which to this day serves me better any textbook or formal education.

Speaking of formal education, I naturally aimed to get an Electrical Engineering degree which I received in early 1980s (still trying hard to not give away my age!). During that time though, the personal computer revolution was upon us and I quickly fell in love with my second hobby: software. I programmed my Apple II and later managed the computer lab at the college where I wrote a bunch of custom software including an editor all the students used to write their programs.

During schooling, I worked at an electronics repair shop, fixing everything from audio equipment to VHF radios. That childhood experience really got cemented combined with a new skill of having to troubleshoot equipment, usually with no schematic. All in all, I repaired hundreds of pieces of equipment, getting a good feel for quality engineering versus not.

Back to the degree, once I graduated, the first job I found was actually software, not engineering. I became a Unix “kernel” (Operating system) developer working on then new, Unix operating system. That gave me another baptism by fire having to learn nearly half a million lines of code with nary any documentation. This was at a large minicomputer company producing systems costing nearly $300,000. Kernel work gets you pretty close to hardware and during that time, I got a very deep understanding of it. This was a good thing as Unix became the foundation for much of what we use today from Linux to Android, MacOS and Windows.

In late 1980s I had an opportunity to work at the computer division of Sony. Initially the job was building a software team to develop Unix but we proposed and won approval to design and build our own hardware to go with it. There we went deep, developing our own ASICs (large scale custom electronic IC), motherboards, audio subsystem, power supply, LCD display etc. Working for Sony was great as at that time they were in their peak of success and their quality standards were quite high. We combined that with great engineering from US in silicon valley and really pushed state of the art in design and simulation at that time.

It was during that time that I got exposed to products of a then new company, Audio Precision (AP). They had overnight obsoleted audio measurement products from likes of HP (now Agilent/Keysight). I bought one for the team but I was the only one who learned to use it. It cost a cool $25,000 which at the time (early 1990s) was quite a lot of money. Still is today.

Sony fell on hard times after acquiring Columbia Pictures so my team was let go. I was offered to stay there but I got bored and left. In return for some consulting though, I got to keep that original AP (which I later gave to my brother -- the unit I have now is much newer).

Having developed my hardware skills, the next two companies I worked for also developed hardware and software: Abekas Video Systems and Pinnacle (now part of Avid). There, I managed hardware, firmware and software engineers development high-end hardware for real-time effects, switching, graphics, editing, etc. I am fortunate enough to have managed a very smart team which won two technical Emmy Awards.

By then a new development was happening: the web. I had worked extensively on networking which was the underpinning of the Internet. The advent of browsers took that to a new level and I wanted to be a part of that. So when my ex-boss from Akekas called me to say he was leading a Stanford-university start-up that was streaming video on the web, I jump at the chance to lead engineering there.

This was in the days of dial-up modems and trying to send video and audio through such slow link was nothing short of a miracle. Still, we managed to do it well enough that the company got acquired by Microsoft back in 1997 (https://news.microsoft.com/1997/08/...timedia-strategy-with-release-of-netshow-2-0/).

I specialized at Microsoft in driving our technology through other products than just the PC. At the time everyone was the enemy of Microsoft it seemed so it was a big challenge. At the end, we did it with our products literally shipping billions of other devices and every Blu-ray player. Only Apple refused to ship and use it. To date, those products all generate significant royalty stream for Microsoft, long after I am gone from there.

During my time at Microsoft, as VP of Digital Media Division, I grew to manage a division of nearly 1000 engineers, testers, marketing and business development people. One of the groups I managed though was the signal processing team which produced audio and video compression technologies. Both of those relied on refreshing my knowledge of the core signal processing science back in college and learning a ton more about new domains like psychoacoustics. Formal and controlled testing was a part of that just the same. Through training, I became an “expert” in finding difficult audio distortions that many could not. This training is serving me well to this day in being able to pass audio objectivist challenges of blind tests of small distortions.

I am very proud of the accomplishments of my team at Microsoft as it led to winning yet another technical Emmy award (see https://flic.kr/p/x72F4 . I am the one on the right). I also received an incredible education working with my many top engineers from audio processing to streaming and audio subsystem in the OS.

I retired from Microsoft back in 2007 (officially left in 2008) and created a start-up which was acquired by Fortune 50 companies. I currently own a system integration company, Madrona Digital, that does security, audio/video, lighting, networking, etc. for mid to high-end homes and commercial buildings (no retail sales). This gives me great exposure to the industry and the “back story” of it.

So what does this all mean? Well, it means that I am very familiar with many aspects of the systems we talk about. I am comfortable talking about networking and streaming one minute, and good power supply design the next. Hey, we could even talk about patents, business aspects, etc.

No, it doesn’t mean I know more than anyone in these fields. Many people have more experience than me in their deep vertical. What it means is that I have a broader set of experiences than most, and I have the knowledge to dig deep and analyze what is going on after some 40 years of being immersed in all aspects related to audio and technology.

Here is a list of technologies I feel very comfortable in:

1. Computer architecture, hardware design, networking, operating system, memory management, system architecture, etc.

2. Internet protocols and streaming technologies

3. Audio/Video signal processing, compression, psychoacoustics, controlled/blind testing

4. Analog and digital electronics

5. Sound reproduction in rooms (learned post retirement from some of the best teachers one can have such as Dr. Floyd Toole)

6. Audio measurements and analysis.

7. Bad sense of humor which you will see peppered in most of my writing.


So there it is. No more complaining about who this idiot is that is writing these articles.

Hello, Amir Majidimehr, congratulations for all your achievements, advisory support and guidance for all ASR members, I am a new freshman member, I have been following the activity of ASR with pleasure for a long time. Please advice for me as a new member and how to request the testing of some electronic products from you?

 

[Deleted member 21219]

Hello, Amir Majidimehr, congratulations for all your achievements, advisory support and guidance for all ASR members, I am a new freshman member, I have been following the activity of ASR with pleasure for a long time. Please advice for me as a new member and how to request the testing of some electronic products from you?

Perhaps this thread ........

A wishlist of gear to be reviewed by Amir

My wish list (in random order): 1) Benchmark HPA4 (both the line amplifier part and the headphone amplifier part). 2) Benchmark AHB2 3) Revel Ultima Salon2. 4) KEF Reference 1. 5) (added) Reviews of acoustic treatment products from manufacturers like Acoustic GRG Products Ltd (making RPG) or...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Jim

 

[Dinesh Menon]

This is a bit about your host, Amir Majidimehr. I am writing this as to give more context to people reading my technical reviews and measurements. I have realized that without this context, many assume I am yet another blogger spitting out graphs. That is very true but let’s see if we can confuse them with an alternate reality!

Without giving away my exact age, I grew up in 1960s with analog electronics as my primary hobby. Learned that from my oldest brother who likewise had the same hobby and spent his nights and days designing electronics. This gave me an intuition for analog electronics which to this day serves me better any textbook or formal education.

Speaking of formal education, I naturally aimed to get an Electrical Engineering degree which I received in early 1980s (still trying hard to not give away my age!). During that time though, the personal computer revolution was upon us and I quickly fell in love with my second hobby: software. I programmed my Apple II and later managed the computer lab at the college where I wrote a bunch of custom software including an editor all the students used to write their programs.

During schooling, I worked at an electronics repair shop, fixing everything from audio equipment to VHF radios. That childhood experience really got cemented combined with a new skill of having to troubleshoot equipment, usually with no schematic. All in all, I repaired hundreds of pieces of equipment, getting a good feel for quality engineering versus not.

Back to the degree, once I graduated, the first job I found was actually software, not engineering. I became a Unix “kernel” (Operating system) developer working on then new, Unix operating system. That gave me another baptism by fire having to learn nearly half a million lines of code with nary any documentation. This was at a large minicomputer company producing systems costing nearly $300,000. Kernel work gets you pretty close to hardware and during that time, I got a very deep understanding of it. This was a good thing as Unix became the foundation for much of what we use today from Linux to Android, MacOS and Windows.

In late 1980s I had an opportunity to work at the computer division of Sony. Initially the job was building a software team to develop Unix but we proposed and won approval to design and build our own hardware to go with it. There we went deep, developing our own ASICs (large scale custom electronic IC), motherboards, audio subsystem, power supply, LCD display etc. Working for Sony was great as at that time they were in their peak of success and their quality standards were quite high. We combined that with great engineering from US in silicon valley and really pushed state of the art in design and simulation at that time.

It was during that time that I got exposed to products of a then new company, Audio Precision (AP). They had overnight obsoleted audio measurement products from likes of HP (now Agilent/Keysight). I bought one for the team but I was the only one who learned to use it. It cost a cool $25,000 which at the time (early 1990s) was quite a lot of money. Still is today.

Sony fell on hard times after acquiring Columbia Pictures so my team was let go. I was offered to stay there but I got bored and left. In return for some consulting though, I got to keep that original AP (which I later gave to my brother -- the unit I have now is much newer).

Having developed my hardware skills, the next two companies I worked for also developed hardware and software: Abekas Video Systems and Pinnacle (now part of Avid). There, I managed hardware, firmware and software engineers development high-end hardware for real-time effects, switching, graphics, editing, etc. I am fortunate enough to have managed a very smart team which won two technical Emmy Awards.

By then a new development was happening: the web. I had worked extensively on networking which was the underpinning of the Internet. The advent of browsers took that to a new level and I wanted to be a part of that. So when my ex-boss from Akekas called me to say he was leading a Stanford-university start-up that was streaming video on the web, I jump at the chance to lead engineering there.

This was in the days of dial-up modems and trying to send video and audio through such slow link was nothing short of a miracle. Still, we managed to do it well enough that the company got acquired by Microsoft back in 1997 (https://news.microsoft.com/1997/08/...timedia-strategy-with-release-of-netshow-2-0/).

I specialized at Microsoft in driving our technology through other products than just the PC. At the time everyone was the enemy of Microsoft it seemed so it was a big challenge. At the end, we did it with our products literally shipping billions of other devices and every Blu-ray player. Only Apple refused to ship and use it. To date, those products all generate significant royalty stream for Microsoft, long after I am gone from there.

During my time at Microsoft, as VP of Digital Media Division, I grew to manage a division of nearly 1000 engineers, testers, marketing and business development people. One of the groups I managed though was the signal processing team which produced audio and video compression technologies. Both of those relied on refreshing my knowledge of the core signal processing science back in college and learning a ton more about new domains like psychoacoustics. Formal and controlled testing was a part of that just the same. Through training, I became an “expert” in finding difficult audio distortions that many could not. This training is serving me well to this day in being able to pass audio objectivist challenges of blind tests of small distortions.

I am very proud of the accomplishments of my team at Microsoft as it led to winning yet another technical Emmy award (see https://flic.kr/p/x72F4 . I am the one on the right). I also received an incredible education working with my many top engineers from audio processing to streaming and audio subsystem in the OS.

I retired from Microsoft back in 2007 (officially left in 2008) and created a start-up which was acquired by Fortune 50 companies. I currently own a system integration company, Madrona Digital, that does security, audio/video, lighting, networking, etc. for mid to high-end homes and commercial buildings (no retail sales). This gives me great exposure to the industry and the “back story” of it.

So what does this all mean? Well, it means that I am very familiar with many aspects of the systems we talk about. I am comfortable talking about networking and streaming one minute, and good power supply design the next. Hey, we could even talk about patents, business aspects, etc.

No, it doesn’t mean I know more than anyone in these fields. Many people have more experience than me in their deep vertical. What it means is that I have a broader set of experiences than most, and I have the knowledge to dig deep and analyze what is going on after some 40 years of being immersed in all aspects related to audio and technology.

Here is a list of technologies I feel very comfortable in:

1. Computer architecture, hardware design, networking, operating system, memory management, system architecture, etc.

2. Internet protocols and streaming technologies

3. Audio/Video signal processing, compression, psychoacoustics, controlled/blind testing

4. Analog and digital electronics

5. Sound reproduction in rooms (learned post retirement from some of the best teachers one can have such as Dr. Floyd Toole)

6. Audio measurements and analysis.

7. Bad sense of humor which you will see peppered in most of my writing.


So there it is. No more complaining about who this idiot is that is writing these articles.

Amir, the name sounded familiar to me.
But my assumption about your look always clashed with your profile pic. After seeing your pic, my insight turned right.
Your "alternate reality" is in fact about an illustrious tech wizard. I thought you were just an audio science expert.
Actually we are the ignorant idiots reading your hi-tech reviews to become hi-fi geeks.
Best Wishes Sir