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By Adriana Noton, January 29, 2012 8:00 pm

In general, nothing you do in life is easy. For the aspiring composer this is just as true as it would be for any other occupation. The actual writing is usually not time-consuming, in fact it might take only half an hour. The real time-consuming effort comes later when the composer tries to find a way to promote his song. Luckily, nowadays there are many different ways of music promotion.

The objective of most people in the business is to make money, and to make money the music must be saleable. There must be those who are willing to pay money to either buy the sheet music, purchase the recording, or pay for the download. When you see the huge amount of music available absolutely free of charge on the internet you can see what professional and would-be professional composers are up against.

In the old days promotion was simpler. It was just a question of finding a publisher to publish your song for you. This, of course, involved a great deal of time and trouble, as most publishers are inundated with demonstration material. It might take them months to work through the list before coming to your song.

Therefore, contacts are important. If you have these, then it will shorten the time for your work to be considered. If you don’t, then there may be a long wait before you receive a reply, if there is any reply at all. Don’t be discouraged by this. Keep writing and submitting. Most composers have a large number of works in the submission pipeline.

Then are people and organizations which are not publishers, but act as brokers or middlemen on behalf of singers, TV producers, movie makers and so on. There will be a demand for a certain type of music, and certain type of song and these people will scout around until they find something which they think will match what is required.

Much of what we can find free on the internet is put there by singers, bands, songwriters, and so on, because they cannot find anyone anywhere else to use their material. By allowing it to be heard free, they hope that some publisher, some singer, some music organization will take notice of it and make them some kind of offer for it.

Those who don’t like the idea of making their compositions available for free can put them up for sale on their own websites. In this way they can set their own prices and get paid directly without having to surrender any portion of the price to anybody else. Or alternatively, they can make use of radio stations which are willing to pay a fee every time a song is played.

All of them though, are hoping one day to have what is called a top hit, or even better, a song or tune which becomes an evergreen. Of course, a top hit will bring in big amounts of money for everybody, but only for a short period. On the other hand an evergreen will provide a steady income for a lifetime. If your song is good, if it fits in with fashions, and what is wanted, there is a good chance that it will meet with success. The truth is however, is that music promotion is both slow and hard.

There are many ways to promote your music online. Using music distribution companies can help get your music on iTunes or many other music broadcasters.

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By Veronica Miles, January 22, 2012 12:03 am

The digital revolution has transformed the way in which we receive information and indulge in entertainment. We no longer have to listen to the radio, watch TV, go to the films, or pick up books at our local Waterstone's. Instead , we are able to get nearly of the information and entertainment we need with 1 or 2 clicks of our mouse.

Digital videos, ebooks, and audio products are appealing for 2 first reasons: they are cost-effective and they are immediately downloadable. Because there isn't any producing process as such, you don't have to pay for real goods or packing. And, those providing informational products and digital entertainment don't have the high overhead costs of a brick-and-mortar retail outlet,eg leasing a storefront and paying wages of sales associates. As a consequence, digital downloads are a little part of the cost of the similar items you’d buy at a store.

Likewise, digital info and entertainment offers the final convenience. Because electronic products are immediately downloadable, you can easily find what you need, pay for it, and download it in a case of minutes. You never need to traipse to the store, face online backorders, or wait for your books, music, and videos to arrive in the mail.

As the technology to create digital videos, e-books, and audio products is widely available, you have got a larger choice than ever before. Indeed, you'll be able to find wonderful sources of information and entertainment that conventional publishers might overlook. Furthermore, many sources of entertainment and informative products allow you to sample the wares before you buy, by allowing you to listen to a little of the audio or read a few pages of the ebooks.

That is not to say that, as an example, bestsellers aren't available on audio. You can find audio versions of James Patterson and Michael Connelly crime stories as well as non-fiction bestsellers like “Freakonomics” and “Preacher and the Presidents.”

But you may also find e-books on a large range of subjects written by professionals who may never publish a bound book. For example, maybe you love to garden and need to learn the systems of bonsai gardening or how to do companion planting and design an organic, renewable food system.

Due to the lead-time concerned in publishing a book, e-books also permit you to get up to the minute information on punctual subjects. Take the current housing market, for example. If you're a property owner who wants to sell or a backer looking to milk the rise in repossessions, you cannot afford to wait a year or two for a book to be put out to learn the best systems for hitting your goal. Electronic books permit you to get the information you need at the moment.

Perhaps the best feature of downloadable products is flexibility. As an example, you can download audio books without any special software, and then either hear them, transfer them to an MP3 player, or burn them onto a CD.

Digital videos, ebooks, and audio products are the wave of the future – and the future is today!

Looking for a great electronic book reader? Check out our ereader reviews to find a model that’s right for you.

Want to compare ereaders? Our Nook Vs Kindle ereader comparison will help. Or read our full Nook Tablet review.

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By Gunter Fellbaum, September 15, 2011 12:51 pm

In this article, I will explain the term “total harmonic distortion”, often also called “THD” which is frequently used to describe the performance of wireless outdoor speakers.

Looking for the perfect model from the huge amount of products, you may have a hard time understanding some of the technical language and terms that you will find in the specifications of today’s wireless speakers. THD is usually not as easily understood as some other commonly used terms such as “signal-to-noise ratio” or “frequency response”.

In short, “harmonic distortion” describes how much the audio signal is being degraded as a result of the speaker or in other words how much the signal differs from the original signal. There are two common ways to express harmonic distortion, either in percent (%) or in decibel (dB). If a speaker specifies a distortion of 10% for example then one tenth of the energy radiated by the speaker is distortion. A distortion of 10% can also be expressed as -20 dB. 1% distortion equals -40dB.

A wireless speaker actually has several components which contribute to harmonic distortion. One of these is the built-in power amplifier. This amplifier is driving the speaker element. Usually the higher the amplifier is driven the higher the amount of amplifier distortion. For this reason, some manufacturers will list amplifier distortion depending on amplifier power.

Distortion specs for different power levels are usually given for several power levels or as a diagram showing distortion versus output power. Both of these methods allow to better evaluate the quality of the amp.Normally distortion is measured with a 1 kHz test tone. However, amplifier distortion will usually increase with increasing frequency, especially in digital class-D models.

The second contributing factor is the loudspeaker element itself. Most speakers use a diaphragm type driver which is driven by a coil that is suspended in a magnetic field. The coil will follow the magnetic field which is controlled by the audio signal to move the diaphragm. However, this movement is not perfectly linear. This results in the signal being distorted by the speaker element itself. Also, the larger to power level with which the speaker is driven, the larger the distortion. Often speaker manufacturers will show distortion for small to moderate power levels only.

As such both the amplifier as well as the speaker element itself contribute to distortion. In addition, there are other factors which also contribute to distortion. The total amount of distortion is the sum of all of these factors. Depending on the material used to build the speaker enclosure, there will be vibrations or box resonances. These usually depend on the sound pressure level, the box shape, the enclosure material and audio frequency. Therefore additional sound distortion will be caused by the box itself.

Total distortion is best determined by measurement. A signal generator is used which provides a highly linear sine tone to the speaker. The sound is picked up by a measurement microphone. The microphone signal is then analyzed by an audio analyzer. The audio analyzer will compute the amount of higher harmonics or distortion. Intermodulation distortion analysis is another method which gives better picture of the speaker distortion performance with real-world signals by using a test signal with two harmonics and measuring how many harmonics at different frequencies are produced by the speaker.

Another factor contributing to distortion is the signal transmission of wireless speakers, especially with models that transmit an analog signal at 900 MHz. More advanced models use digital audio transmission. Typically these transmitters work at 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz.

You can get further details about wireless speakers as well as wireless surround sound speakers from Amphony’s website.

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By Gunter Fellbaum, September 10, 2011 12:47 pm

Demands regarding audio power and audio fidelity of today’s speakers and home theater systems are constantly growing. At the heart of these systems is the audio amplifier. Today’s audio amps have perform well enough to meet these ever growing demands. With the ever increasing amount of models and design topologies, such as “tube amps”, “class-A”, “class-D” and “t-amp” designs, it is becoming more and more difficult to pick the amp which is ideal for a particular application. This article will explain some of the most common terms and clarify some of the technical jargon which amplifier manufacturers often use.

An audio amp will convert a low-level audio signal which often comes from a high-impedance source into a high-level signal which can drive a loudspeaker with a low impedance. Depending on the type of amp, one of several types of elements are used to amplify the signal such as tubes and transistors.

Tube amps were commonly used a few decades ago and utilize a vacuum tube which controls a high-voltage signal in accordance to a low-voltage control signal. Tubes, however, are nonlinear in their behavior and will introduce a fairly large amount of higher harmonics or distortion. A lot of people prefer tube amps because these higher harmonics are often perceived as the tube amp sounding “warm” or “pleasant”.

One drawback of tube amps is their low power efficiency. In other words, most of the energy consumed by the amp is wasted as heat rather than being converted into audio. Therefore tube amps will run hot and need sufficient cooling. Tube amps, however, a fairly expensive to make and therefore tube amps have mostly been replaced with amps using transistor elements which are less expensive to manufacture.

Solid-state amps use a semiconductor elements, such as a bipolar transistor or FET in place of the tube and the earliest type is known as “class-A” amps. The working principle of class-A amps is very similar to that of tube amps. The main difference is that a transistor is being used in place of the tube for amplifying the audio signal. The amplified high-level signal is sometimes fed back in order to minimize harmonic distortion. If you require an ultra-low distortion amplifier then you might want to investigate class-A amps since they offer amongst the lowest distortion of any audio amps. However, similar to tube amps, class-A amps have very low power efficiency and most of the energy is wasted.

To improve on the low efficiency of class-A amps, class-AB amps employ a series of transistors which each amplify a separate area, each of which being more efficient than class-A amps. Due to the higher efficiency, class-AB amps do not require the same amount of heat sinks as class-A amps. Therefore they can be made lighter and cheaper. When the signal transitions between the two separate regions, however, some amount of distortion is being generated, thus class-AB amps will not achieve the same audio fidelity as class-A amps.

Class-D amps improve on the efficiency of class-AB amps even further by using a switching transistor which is constantly being switched on or off. Thereby this switching stage hardly dissipates any power and thus the power efficiency of class-D amps usually exceeds 90%. The switching transistor is being controlled by a pulse-width modulator. The switched large-level signal has to be lowpass filtered in order to remove the switching signal and recover the audio signal. Due to non-linearities of the pulse-width modulator and the switching transistor itself, class-D amps by nature have amongst the highest audio distortion of any audio amplifier.

More recent audio amps incorporate some sort of mechanism to minimize distortion. One approach is to feed back the amplified audio signal to the input of the amp to compare with the amplified signal. The difference signal is then used to correct the switching stage and compensate for the nonlinearity. “Class-T” amps (also called “t-amp”) use this type of feedback mechanism and therefore can be made extremely small while achieving low audio distortion.

You can find further information regarding t amps as well as stereo amplifiers from Amphony’s website.

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By Gunter Fellbaum, August 26, 2011 12:59 pm

Modern amplifiers come in all shapes and sizes. Finding the perfect model for your application can often be tricky. There is a flood of different names and terms describing audio amps, such as “Class D” or “T-amp“. Also, each manufacturer publishes a large number of specifications, including “SNR”, “dynamic distortion” etc. In this article, I will have a closer look at one of the most fundamental of these terms: amplifier output power. This term is also known as “amplifier wattage”.

Amplifier specifications are sometimes hard to interpret since they are not fully standardized. As such it may be difficult to figure out the true performance of the amp simply by looking at the specs. One good method though is to do a listening test before purchasing your amp. During this test you ideally want to set up the amp in a similar environment as your application. Now I will give some details about “amplifier wattage”. This spec is often misunderstood. It is important to look fairly closely at how the manufacturer shows this parameter.

“Wattage” is sometimes also known as “Power” or “amplifier output power”. To put it in a nutshell, “wattage” relates to how high the amp can drive your speakers. The higher this number the louder your speakers. You want to pick the amplifier wattage based on how large your listening environment is. For best audio quality, you may want to go with an amp that has higher power than you need since many amps will show increasing distortion as the audio power goes up.

Wattage is either given as “Watts peak” which means the amp can produce short burst of this amount of power or “Watts rms” which show how much power the amp can deliver for a longer period of time. In the past, vendors have usually preferred listing the “peak power”. This number is higher than the average or “rms” power. However, “peak power” can often be misleading since there is no standard showing the amount of time that the amplifier has to be able to deliver this amount of power.

Today most amps will specify rms power which gives a better indication of the amps true performance. However, please ensure that your amp has enough headroom to avoid clipping of the audio. Having enough headroom is essential since music signals differ a great deal from sine wave signals which are used to measure rms power. Short bursts of high power are often found in music signals. These bursts will drive the amp into high distortion unless the peak power is high enough.

Please note that often the peak power of the amp will depend on the impedance of your speakers which is typically between 4 and 8 Ohms. Due to the limited amplifier supply voltage, the maximum output power will be half if you connect an 8-Ohm speaker of the peak power that the amp can deliver to a 4-Ohm speaker. Usually maximum power is specified for a 4-Ohm speaker impedance. However, ideally the manufacturer will tell which speaker impedance the power rating is being referenced to. Please note that some amplifiers cannot drive speakers with very low speaker impedance.

You can find more information about modern t-amps in addition to stereo amplifiers at Amphony’s website.