Audio

The MagPi, Issue 69

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The MagPi Issue 69This month’s issue of The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, has a review which took an unexpected turn: the Andrea Electronics PureAudio Array Microphone Development Kit, or MDK.

When Andrea’s kit – which is comprised of a PureAudio-branded USB soundcard based on a common low-cost USB audio chip, a SuperBeam stereo microphone with Velcro fixing pad, and some downloadable software – arrived, it did so under a different name: the Speech Development Kit, or SDK. The brief documentation provided explained that the kit made it easy to develop your own voice-activated software, detecting a trigger phrase and running tasks accordingly.

Sadly, that turned out not to be the case. While the bundled software does indeed activate on a trigger phrase, that’s all it does; to actually achieve anything, you need to write your own software. Not even basic text-to-speech or speech-to-text functionality is included, and while Andrea provided at-the-time unreleased ‘vocabulary files’ for individual instructions these were extremely limited and not user expandable. Worse, the clever filtering library – the only thing that makes the kit stand out from an off-the-shelf microphone and cheap USB soundcard – does not appear to the system as a driver, and is functional only with software you write yourself and the bundled extremely simple demonstration program.

Throughout the review, Andrea Electronics remained in constant communication, and took all my criticisms of the bundle on board. The result: a rapid shift in targeting, removing consumer- and hobbyist-oriented marketing from the bundle and repositioning it as a microphone – rather than speech – development kit aimed solely at professional developers. While it’s still not something I could recommend, it is at least now properly placed in the market.

For the full review, you can pick up The MagPi Issue 69 in print now at your nearest supermarket or newsagent, or download the full issue for free under a Creative Commons licence from the official website.

The MagPi, Issue 67

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MagPi Issue 67This month’s MagPi magazine includes a review of the Allo DigiOne Player, a clever though high-priced add-on for the Raspberry Pi which its creator claims gives it pitch-perfect digital audio capabilities.

Designed as a ‘digital transport’ – a device which provides a digital, rather than analogue, signal for decoding by an external digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) – the DigiOne Player is a plug-and-play design based on Allo’s DigiOne S/PDIF HAT. As the name suggests, the primary part of the Player is a Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) add-on for the Raspberry Pi which provides a Sony/Philips Digital Interface (S/PDIF) audio output on an RCA or BNC jack; the Player is simply a bundle which includes a Pi, case, and cabling.

There’s no denying that the DigiOne is a clever design, with a surprising amount of hardware crammed into a small space. At nearly £150, though, it’s priced head and shoulders above the competition and lacks some of their features – such as the optical output of the £30 JustBoom Digi HAT, ditched due to what Allo calls unacceptable built-in jitter levels avoided through the use of electrical connectivity.

For my conclusion on the device’s value, you can pick up The MagPi Issue 67 at your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or for free download under a Creative Commons licence via the official website.

The Battle of Britain’s Home Computers

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The Battle of Britain's Home ComputersI was recently asked to give a lecture to members of the Computer Conservation Society on the topic of early British home computers, which is very dear to my heart. For those unfamiliar the CCS is a Specialist Group of the British Computing Society, founded in cooperation with the Science Museum of London and the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, with the aim of conserving and restoring classic computers while working to develop awareness of their historical significance. The group has been responsible for a number of notable successes since its formation in 1989, from the wartime Colossus and Bombe rebuilds to the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) replica, with a complete list available on the official website.

A benefit of membership is access to the group’s regular lectures, which bring together experts and industry luminaries to share their knowledge – and, for some inexplicable reason, me. Given an hour-long slot – which I cheekily overran by about fifteen minutes, having digressed somewhat along the way – I shared what I know on the ‘golden era’ of British home computing: 1980 to 1984, boom to bust.

The talk was very well received, thanks mostly to a terrifically warm and welcoming audience, and the elongated question-and-answer session at the end was a thrill – and revealed just which of the many computers released in the UK during that time truly had the biggest impact, including the discovery that one brave soul runs his business from a handful of disguised eight-bit micros to this day!

A video of the talk was recorded, but is not yet available. If you have an hour and three quarters to kill and don’t want to wait, you can download the slide deck and stream the audio – just move onto the next slide whenever you hear the thump of me hitting the space bar and you’ll be in-sync. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to listen offline, the slides and an MP3 recording can be downloaded together.

I will be giving the lecture again to the northern branch of the CCS next year, giving you plenty of warning if you’d like to attend.