UWL Guest Lecture 2026-03-11
To all of you that attended – Thanks for coming today and making my day an enjoyable one!
A quick correction – the link below for “Five disfunctions of a team” as originally published
on this page contained an error and pointed to the “Black box Thinking” book.
I’ve fixed that and now you get the correct book!
In the Q&A we discussed the issue of whether Dither matters for todays quantizers.
Here’s a bonus link to a paper by Stanley Lipshitz (Professor Emeritus at the University
of Waterloo (Applied Mathematics) outlining why a format based on a one-bit quantizer is
sub-optimal – which of course can’t be dithered because it doesn’t have any way to
overflow when dither noise is added! So Stanley destroyed the technical proposition of
SONY’s DSD format for the original SACD. Too late came the DXD variant with some more bits!
SACD still has many believers today. Note my reference to John Watkinson’s comment about audio and aviation!
Adding a few more bits to the quantizer enabled it to be dithered and thereby deliver
extended linearity and resolution way beyond the naive estimate of the quantizers dynamic range.
Bonus Link:
Download the presentation
Links from the presentation
- Prism Sound / Spectral Measurement Heritage
- Prism Sound CD Investigation with DCA and SONY Music
- Teams Win! Link to book ‘The five disfunctions of a team’ by Patrick Lencioni
- Graphic illustrating The five disfunctions of a team’ by Patrick Lencioni
- Build better teams and systems – Book: ‘Black Box Thinking’ by Matthew Syed
- Systemic improvement with teamwork – Book: ‘The Goal’ by Eliyahu M Goldratt
Some companies to research ..
- Pragmatic (low cost flexible electronics)
- Focusrite Plc (investor website, they are a big dScope user)
- Audiotonix (Group is a very big dScope user. Private equity investment company)
- ARM holdings