%Dim ArticlePageName(4) ArticlePageName(0) = "A conversation with CEA Engineering Director, Brian Markwalter" ArticlePageName(1) = "Amplifier buyers rejoice: CEA 2006 levels the playing field" ArticlePageName(2) = "What's next for the amp standard?" ArticlePageName(3) = "Mobile A/V standards move into the 21st century"ArticlePath = "/reviews/20040120/markwalter_interview.html"
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These days, everything in mobile audio/video is about convergence: linking your CD player to your digital storage drive, your DVD player to your surround sound setup, your portable devices to your mobile system. It?s an exciting time for the industry, but one that calls for more and more cooperation between the various manufacturers. A cutting-edge video installation is a great thing, but if it can?t talk to the rest of your system or won?t integrate with your speakers, it?s essentially worthless. Clearly, with today?s crop of complex and interconnected products, the need for universally agreed-upon standards that cross manufacturing lines has never been greater. That?s where the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) comes in, bringing companies to the table and leveling the playing field with standards for everything from amplifier power ratings to cable TV signals.
We were lucky enough to sit down with Brian Markwalter, Engineering Director with the CEA, at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to talk shop about the association?s new amplifier standard and learn more about what the future holds for the CEA standards program.
Q: Standardization within the industry as a whole seems like a major priority for the CEA. Where do you see the state of mobile electronics in terms of standardization?
A: Right now it?s guided mostly by the resources that everybody [in the industry] can put into it. Our role is really as a facilitator. We organize the process that brings the interested companies together — legally — to make standards for their products. I?d say mobile is on par with the other major segments in terms of getting standards established and reaching agreements between the manufacturers.
Q: So you?re just trying to bring all the interested parties together in a common place and get them to agree on something?
A: Exactly. Standards are critical for our industry; they?re the only way that we?re going to be able to sell large volume. The manufacturers share a lot of the same problems when it comes to development, so once they agree on ways to handle them, everybody can go and build the best, cheapest products they can — and that all depends on standards. Our process just lets them do it openly and legally so they don?t violate any anti-trust laws. It?s all open to anyone who wants to participate.
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These days, everything in mobile audio/video is about convergence: linking your CD player to your digital storage drive, your DVD player to your surround sound setup, your portable devices to your mobile system. It?s an exciting time for the industry, but one that calls for more and more cooperation between the various manufacturers. A cutting-edge video installation is a great thing, but if it can?t talk to the rest of your system or won?t integrate with your speakers, it?s essentially worthless. Clearly, with today?s crop of complex and interconnected products, the need for universally agreed-upon standards that cross manufacturing lines has never been greater. That?s where the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) comes in, bringing companies to the table and leveling the playing field with standards for everything from amplifier power ratings to cable TV signals.
We were lucky enough to sit down with Brian Markwalter, Engineering Director with the CEA, at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to talk shop about the association?s new amplifier standard and learn more about what the future holds for the CEA standards program.
Q: Standardization within the industry as a whole seems like a major priority for the CEA. Where do you see the state of mobile electronics in terms of standardization?
A: Right now it?s guided mostly by the resources that everybody [in the industry] can put into it. Our role is really as a facilitator. We organize the process that brings the interested companies together — legally — to make standards for their products. I?d say mobile is on par with the other major segments in terms of getting standards established and reaching agreements between the manufacturers.
Q: So you?re just trying to bring all the interested parties together in a common place and get them to agree on something?
A: Exactly. Standards are critical for our industry; they?re the only way that we?re going to be able to sell large volume. The manufacturers share a lot of the same problems when it comes to development, so once they agree on ways to handle them, everybody can go and build the best, cheapest products they can — and that all depends on standards. Our process just lets them do it openly and legally so they don?t violate any anti-trust laws. It?s all open to anyone who wants to participate.
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Q: The CEA-2006 power rating standard for amplifiers that you released last year has been big news for the industry. What was the driving factor behind it?
A: In that case it came from our Mobile Electronics Board. We?re structured with several product divisions — mobile electronics, home, video, wireless, and others. It?s our way of grouping similar companies together to encourage cooperation. Each product division has a board made up of executives from those companies, and it?s their job to come up with projects and steer our work. With the amplifier standard, the Board got together and said "we need a standard to allow consumers to compare our products on a level playing field." That?s where we came in.
Q: How long did the development and approval process take?
A: It probably took about a year. And the process was fairly structured, as you?d expect from an engineering group. First the Board sat down and looked over some old standards that we had — numbers that a lot of the people involved with us had helped develop in the first place, so it helped to kind of draw from that knowledge base.
From a standards perspective, the engineer?s job is to come up with something that other engineers can use to make measurements, numbers that involve details most people don?t really care about. We took a collective list of things that we knew could be measured, and then broke it down into the one or two items that people should really pay attention to: RMS power and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) plus noise. Consumers typically don?t know enough to help themselves out when they?re buying, so as engineers we wanted to give them an honest set of tools to make comparisons between products.
Q: Let?s talk about the organizational structure again. Does anyone from CEA serve on any of these product division boards?
A: No, they?re more like governance for us. We facilitate all their meetings and basically execute the projects that they come up with. Our mission is just to help the CE industry grow. They come up with large-scale plans and we make them happen. They say ?we need this? and we help them do it. They?re the ones that actually make the standard. In effect, it?s the business guys saying "it?s time for us to go make a standard" and then telling their own engineering departments to get together under our facilities and do it.
Q: Who votes on new standards? Is it the board that approves it or all the mobile electronics members of the CEA?
A: The mobile members that are participating in the process all get to vote on the final standard. Anybody with a material interest in the outcome can come participate.
Q: Was there anyone that was against CEA-2006?
A: I don?t think we had any ?no? votes. We got comments, which is something that you usually have with these things, and we had a couple of editorial issues that we had to clean up, but overall the reaction was very positive.
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Q: The CEA-2006 power rating standard for amplifiers that you released last year has been big news for the industry. What was the driving factor behind it?
A: In that case it came from our Mobile Electronics Board. We?re structured with several product divisions — mobile electronics, home, video, wireless, and others. It?s our way of grouping similar companies together to encourage cooperation. Each product division has a board made up of executives from those companies, and it?s their job to come up with projects and steer our work. With the amplifier standard, the Board got together and said "we need a standard to allow consumers to compare our products on a level playing field." That?s where we came in.
Q: How long did the development and approval process take?
A: It probably took about a year. And the process was fairly structured, as you?d expect from an engineering group. First the Board sat down and looked over some old standards that we had — numbers that a lot of the people involved with us had helped develop in the first place, so it helped to kind of draw from that knowledge base.
From a standards perspective, the engineer?s job is to come up with something that other engineers can use to make measurements, numbers that involve details most people don?t really care about. We took a collective list of things that we knew could be measured, and then broke it down into the one or two items that people should really pay attention to: RMS power and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) plus noise. Consumers typically don?t know enough to help themselves out when they?re buying, so as engineers we wanted to give them an honest set of tools to make comparisons between products.
Q: Let?s talk about the organizational structure again. Does anyone from CEA serve on any of these product division boards?
A: No, they?re more like governance for us. We facilitate all their meetings and basically execute the projects that they come up with. Our mission is just to help the CE industry grow. They come up with large-scale plans and we make them happen. They say ?we need this? and we help them do it. They?re the ones that actually make the standard. In effect, it?s the business guys saying "it?s time for us to go make a standard" and then telling their own engineering departments to get together under our facilities and do it.
Q: Who votes on new standards? Is it the board that approves it or all the mobile electronics members of the CEA?
A: The mobile members that are participating in the process all get to vote on the final standard. Anybody with a material interest in the outcome can come participate.
Q: Was there anyone that was against CEA-2006?
A: I don?t think we had any ?no? votes. We got comments, which is something that you usually have with these things, and we had a couple of editorial issues that we had to clean up, but overall the reaction was very positive.
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Q: I don?t know how much interest the new standard has generated, but at Crutchfield it really popped out at us because we?ve always gone to great lengths to distinguish between RMS power and peak power when describing amplifiers in our catalogs. So when this came along, we were like, ?yes, finally.? The next step is explaining it to the customer, because it?s not an easy thing to explain.
A: You?re right, it is a big deal. We were pretty late getting things together for the CES show this year, but I think we've got a number of very good names signed on to the new standard. We?ve got the big boys: Alpine, Rockford Fosgate, Sony, Audiovox, Harman, Kenwood, Pioneer; and with the others, if they?re not on there, it?s simply a matter of timing and the crunch before the show. I?ve haven?t heard anybody say that this is a bad idea.
Q: In terms of letting people know about this new standard ? are retailers aware of this yet? Are they behind it or is it still sort of early in the stages?
A: It?s still a little bit early, but a large marketing campaign is definitely in the plans. Once the engineers develop the standard and everyone agrees on it, the promotion part of it goes back to the business side of the Mobile Division Board. We?ll try to get it out in front of retailers much more this year, something that our member companies are going to be doing at the same time. They obviously have much more personal contact with the retailers, so our role will really be to create some collateral materials to try and help them explain it — maybe set up some mailings or other publications that they can use with consumers to help convey the facts. It?ll be a combination of CEA facilitated work with retailers and the manufacturers' own individual contact with them, so somewhere in there we?ll hopefully get our message across. I think that those who have been involved in consumer electronics (CE) for a while will understand what this is and why it?s important, but there are a lot of retailers out there and we need to reach all of them, so there will definitely be an outreach and education campaign this year.
Q: Will we see ?04 products with the CEA logo on them?
A: Absolutely. I don?t know what specific announcements the separate companies have made or are planning to make — I know Alpine has come out in support, Rockford Fosgate and Harman-Kardon have. With the rest of the members, I think it?s probably a more complicated process of rolling the standard in during the middle of the year. It kind of depends on when they found out about it and got their hands on the standard — but for sure many of the products will be carrying the logo this year.
% end if
Q: I don?t know how much interest the new standard has generated, but at Crutchfield it really popped out at us because we?ve always gone to great lengths to distinguish between RMS power and peak power when describing amplifiers in our catalogs. So when this came along, we were like, ?yes, finally.? The next step is explaining it to the customer, because it?s not an easy thing to explain.
A: You?re right, it is a big deal. We were pretty late getting things together for the CES show this year, but I think we've got a number of very good names signed on to the new standard. We?ve got the big boys: Alpine, Rockford Fosgate, Sony, Audiovox, Harman, Kenwood, Pioneer; and with the others, if they?re not on there, it?s simply a matter of timing and the crunch before the show. I?ve haven?t heard anybody say that this is a bad idea.
Q: In terms of letting people know about this new standard ? are retailers aware of this yet? Are they behind it or is it still sort of early in the stages?
A: It?s still a little bit early, but a large marketing campaign is definitely in the plans. Once the engineers develop the standard and everyone agrees on it, the promotion part of it goes back to the business side of the Mobile Division Board. We?ll try to get it out in front of retailers much more this year, something that our member companies are going to be doing at the same time. They obviously have much more personal contact with the retailers, so our role will really be to create some collateral materials to try and help them explain it — maybe set up some mailings or other publications that they can use with consumers to help convey the facts. It?ll be a combination of CEA facilitated work with retailers and the manufacturers' own individual contact with them, so somewhere in there we?ll hopefully get our message across. I think that those who have been involved in consumer electronics (CE) for a while will understand what this is and why it?s important, but there are a lot of retailers out there and we need to reach all of them, so there will definitely be an outreach and education campaign this year.
Q: Will we see ?04 products with the CEA logo on them?
A: Absolutely. I don?t know what specific announcements the separate companies have made or are planning to make — I know Alpine has come out in support, Rockford Fosgate and Harman-Kardon have. With the rest of the members, I think it?s probably a more complicated process of rolling the standard in during the middle of the year. It kind of depends on when they found out about it and got their hands on the standard — but for sure many of the products will be carrying the logo this year.
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if DoPage(4) then%>
Q: What other product standards are you all working on?
A: We have a couple of active projects going on now; nothing measurement related like this in Mobile, but we always have something in the works. One involving audio books [CEA-2005] that?s kind of unusual; we?re handling it since audio book users — books on tape — tend to listen to them in their cars, and we didn?t really have another home for it. We also have ongoing activity related to car kit adapters to interface with cell phones. The cell phone industry has been interested in using a standardized interface for a while now, and they came to us to get our help coming up with something. We?re also working on one for wireless networking in the car, but that?s a little more future oriented.
Q: That?s an interesting one. We?re hearing a lot about Bluetooth® and Wi-Fi wireless these days — how will that sort of technology be integrated in the car?
A: That?s an interesting situation, where the OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] car companies are driving the developments on our side. There?s a technology called MOST, a multimedia, fiber optic networking system for the car, which actually came out of Europe. BMW and a number of other companies over there launched it as a way to handle their growing electronics installations. The automotive companies were saying, "there?s so much electronic gear in our cars now, we need to find a way to network it all together — especially all this entertainment stuff — because to just keep pulling wires for everything doesn?t make sense anymore."
Q: So is the CEA looking at applying MOST as an industry standard?
A: Yes. The question we?re asking ourselves now is: "how do we take this networking technology — which someone else created for OEM use — and apply it to our aftermarket purposes?" This was another one where the Board came to us and said: "we?ve got to do something about connectivity. We?re all putting more electronics in our cars, the installations are getting more complicated, and the sheer cost of using more and more copper wiring is getting out of hand. These OEMs have invented a system for themselves that?s the same sort of thing that we need, let?s take a look at that."
Q: Do you think the industry is heading away from traditional RCA cables and towards fiber optics in terms of connectivity?
A: I don?t know if it?s a predictor of that or not. Right now we?ve got a bunch of very smart companies that got together, did some engineering, and came up with something that?s right for them. But legacy stuff like RCA connectors and wire installations aren?t going to go away in a hurry, so we?ll just have to wait and see. [Fiber optics] seem to make sense for a wide variety of products in the car, and being able to move audio and video content — which is getting richer and richer — between different devices in the car would be very exciting.
Q: That?s sort of like the whole theme of CES 2004 — interconnectivity between devices across the spectrum.
A: That?s right, and it?s one that we?ve been looking at for a long time, just kind of waiting for the car OEMs to point in some direction. MOST was the first time we noticed more than two or three of them getting together and saying "we?re going to do it this way," so we decided to work with them and try to adapt it for our purposes too.
Q: I can just imagine the amazing benefits that wireless technology would offer in the car — no longer having to run wires from an amp in the back of your car to the front receiver, connecting your overhead DVD monitor to the player under your seat. It could have huge potential.
A: Yes, and that?s what we?re hoping to encourage with this. It?s really up to the manufacturers to develop the products and decide what they need to make it work. If the technology?s not there, they?ll come to us and say "there?s a piece missing,? and we?ll step in to help them specify a standard so they all handle it the same way. That?s the function that we serve.
Tim Sprinkle writes about car A/V gear for Crutchfield. Todd Cabell is the Car A/V Editor of CrutchfieldAdvisor.com.
Q: What other product standards are you all working on?
A: We have a couple of active projects going on now; nothing measurement related like this in Mobile, but we always have something in the works. One involving audio books [CEA-2005] that?s kind of unusual; we?re handling it since audio book users — books on tape — tend to listen to them in their cars, and we didn?t really have another home for it. We also have ongoing activity related to car kit adapters to interface with cell phones. The cell phone industry has been interested in using a standardized interface for a while now, and they came to us to get our help coming up with something. We?re also working on one for wireless networking in the car, but that?s a little more future oriented.
Q: That?s an interesting one. We?re hearing a lot about Bluetooth® and Wi-Fi wireless these days — how will that sort of technology be integrated in the car?
A: That?s an interesting situation, where the OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] car companies are driving the developments on our side. There?s a technology called MOST, a multimedia, fiber optic networking system for the car, which actually came out of Europe. BMW and a number of other companies over there launched it as a way to handle their growing electronics installations. The automotive companies were saying, "there?s so much electronic gear in our cars now, we need to find a way to network it all together — especially all this entertainment stuff — because to just keep pulling wires for everything doesn?t make sense anymore."
Q: So is the CEA looking at applying MOST as an industry standard?
A: Yes. The question we?re asking ourselves now is: "how do we take this networking technology — which someone else created for OEM use — and apply it to our aftermarket purposes?" This was another one where the Board came to us and said: "we?ve got to do something about connectivity. We?re all putting more electronics in our cars, the installations are getting more complicated, and the sheer cost of using more and more copper wiring is getting out of hand. These OEMs have invented a system for themselves that?s the same sort of thing that we need, let?s take a look at that."
Q: Do you think the industry is heading away from traditional RCA cables and towards fiber optics in terms of connectivity?
A: I don?t know if it?s a predictor of that or not. Right now we?ve got a bunch of very smart companies that got together, did some engineering, and came up with something that?s right for them. But legacy stuff like RCA connectors and wire installations aren?t going to go away in a hurry, so we?ll just have to wait and see. [Fiber optics] seem to make sense for a wide variety of products in the car, and being able to move audio and video content — which is getting richer and richer — between different devices in the car would be very exciting.
Q: That?s sort of like the whole theme of CES 2004 — interconnectivity between devices across the spectrum.
A: That?s right, and it?s one that we?ve been looking at for a long time, just kind of waiting for the car OEMs to point in some direction. MOST was the first time we noticed more than two or three of them getting together and saying "we?re going to do it this way," so we decided to work with them and try to adapt it for our purposes too.
Q: I can just imagine the amazing benefits that wireless technology would offer in the car — no longer having to run wires from an amp in the back of your car to the front receiver, connecting your overhead DVD monitor to the player under your seat. It could have huge potential.
A: Yes, and that?s what we?re hoping to encourage with this. It?s really up to the manufacturers to develop the products and decide what they need to make it work. If the technology?s not there, they?ll come to us and say "there?s a piece missing,? and we?ll step in to help them specify a standard so they all handle it the same way. That?s the function that we serve.
Tim Sprinkle writes about car A/V gear for Crutchfield. Todd Cabell is the Car A/V Editor of CrutchfieldAdvisor.com.