Linea Research Ltd. - Cutting edge professional audio technology

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P. Williams - July 06

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PODWARE V 5.46.0
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Linea Research was formed in 2003 by Davey Smalley, Ben Ver, Pip Wilson and Paul Williams, all of whom had worked together previously in the professional audio industry. The aim was to design, develop and market cutting edge professional audio technology. Having spent much time doing basic research and developing crucial pieces of technology, the company used these developments to produce its first product in 2004, the X-Pod Class-D amplifier with integrated switched-mode power supply and DSP. The X-Pod has been adopted by some very prestigious clients who have collectively now deployed many thousands of these units. Since then, the range of amplifier, DSP, network and software products has greatly expanded. The four founder members are still the active directors.

Our extensive experience in audio engineering and the associated key expanding technologies places us uniquely and ideally to exploit these for our clients. The combination of Switched-Mode Power Supplies (SMPS), sonically transparent Class D Power Amplifiers, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Networking, Software and Design For Manufacture are all areas in which we excel, all of them non-trivial from an engineering perspective. These are the demanding technologies increasingly needed in modern audio systems, and Linea are in the unique position of being able to offer them all to our partners to enable them to deploy leading-edge products quickly into the market place with the minimum of investment outside their core business.

Ben Ver:

Linea's engineering director, Ben Ver has been designing electronic systems professionally for over twenty years. During that time he has designed products for companies involved in industries as diverse as radio communications and mainframe computing. Prior to joining Linea he held various engineering and management positions in professional audio and been responsible for the delivery of some of the industries most innovative products.

Davey Smalley:

An entrepreneur and experienced technical sales person with a passion for audio engineering, Davey Smalley was the Sales Manager for a major Professional Audio manufacturer prior to the inception of Linea. Managing a distribution chain overseas and dealer network domestically, he helped the company to double its turnover and increase its profitability.
Smalley's commercial abilities stem from a detailed technical and operational understanding of the pro-audio world. These skills were honed in the field, operating his own equipment rental company. The enterprise grew successfully over six years, providing sound reinforcement and production services for more than 1200 events. Working at Linea is his perfect job; 'Now I can dream up products and have some of the best designers in the world bring them to life - it's just great!'

Paul Williams:

Research and Development Director, Paul Williams has twenty years of experience in Professional Audio R&D, having innovated and designed some of the most respected premiere branded products in the industry, and can claim to have designed more digital loudspeaker controllers than most! In addition to much experience in analogue, digital and software development, he has expertise in audio Digital Signal Processing (DSP), having written many of the audio DSP algorithms in several high-profile pro audio products. He has been responsible for introducing several new techniques into the industry, some of which are the subject of patent applications.

The staff at Linea Research have decades of combined experience in design and manufacturing which has resulted in the adoption of an approach that leads to very high factory gate quality. Critical to this is ‘design for manufacture’, which yields increased assembly accuracy, robust test regimes, reduced assembly time and high quality in general.

Experience has taught us that regardless of manufacturing volume, 100% inspection and audio listening tests are crucial to maintaining a high level of quality. Naturally, every single product is soak tested and safety tested prior to leaving our factory.

Since the products we make have been designed to be largely modular we are able to test every sub-assembly individually prior to assembling and testing the finished product. Each product is therefore effectively tested twice. We feel that this philosophy pays dividends in terms of field quality and customer confidence.

We pay much attention to test methods, test fixtures and automated test equipment, much of which is designed in house. This has allowed us to design specific equipment for specific assemblies, allowing faster and more targeted tests to be performed. We have also developed our own multi-function multi-channel audio analyser which provides measurement accuracy that is comparable with equipment from Audio Precision. Being script driven, it allows complex procedures to be rapidly developed and subsequently run by the production technicians, to provide wide ranging deep test coverage. As our service and support centres also use this same tester we can ensure consistent quality of any units which pass trough them. Naturally Linea also own a number of the industry standard Audio Precision test sets which allows us independent corroboration and calibration of our own test equipment.

Build standard control is driven through our extensive automated serial number system. Every sub-assembly is serialised, and logged against the final product they end up in. As any changes to a sub-assembly automatically cause a change in its serial number, we are able to determine the exact build standard of any given product by its external serial number.