Apple TV as Music Streamer.

Post by **Nick** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 10:28 pm

Yep, another one of those non existent manufacturing industries that they like to bemoan the lack of in the UK.

Mike H · Post by **Mike H** » Tue Oct 05, 2010 11:06 pm

Wow....

shane · Post by **shane** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:48 am

OK, ARM is british, but the chips aren't made in a UK wafer fab are they? I didn't think we had anything with that sort of capability any more. I'd have assumed it was outsourced to TSMC or somesuch.

Post by **Nick** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:17 am

When you license a ARM processor you don't get a bit of silicon, you get a bunch of VHDL (or similar) to incorporate into your own device. To quote Wiki

"ARM licensed about 1.6 billion cores in 2005. In 2005, about 1 billion ARM cores went into mobile phones.[7] As of January 2008[update], over 10 billion ARM cores have been built, and iSuppli predicts that 5 billion a year will ship in 2011."

Its why I made the comment about the UK apparently not manufacturing any more, we still seem to be hung up on the "making things you can kick" definition of manufacturing. The small company I work for sells software we write in the UK all over the world, but its been 15 years since we last sent anything physical to a customer.

shane · Post by **shane** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:46 am

Exactly. The semiconductor industry in this country used to employ several thousand people designing and manufacturing chips in a number of wafer fabs up and down the country. The designing and licensing still goes on here, but the designs are taped out to Taiwan, and the number of people employed in the industry ia about 20% of what it used to be.

Post by **Nick** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 12:16 pm

I guess it depends on what you define as "the semiconductor industry". Andrew L will know more, but I would guess for most low speed digital stuff now, bespoke fabs are not needed and it can be implemented using generic FPGA's and the like.

shane · Post by **shane** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 1:59 pm

Well this was my bit:

http://www.swindonweb.com/?m=8&s=116&ss ... ey+is+back...

The last paragraph says it all really.

shane · Post by **shane** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 2:16 pm

Hmmmm. posted that link in a bit of a hurry without realising that it rambles on a bit! What is also interesting thogh is the link at the bottom which takes you to a history of Garrard. Everything connects...

Post by **Nick** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 2:48 pm

Yep, we certainly have sadly lost a lot. I was just trying to fight against the common view that we are down to zero and all that was left of the nation was bankers and sandwich makers.

Mike H · Post by **Mike H** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 3:21 pm

It is indeed very interesting, but what I mostly get from that is how companies are founded, relocated, bought out etc., i.e. all driven by market forces and economics. Was ever thus. I note for example it mentions the railway based employment waning, but was fortunately "saved" by Plessey.

Cressy Snr · Post by **Cressy Snr** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 3:40 pm

Here's a link to Digitimes report on iSuppli's teardown of the AppleTV

Apparently it costs $64 to make leaving $35 for, licensing R&D and a bit left for profit.

Interesting bit is that it is the first electronic device out of 1000, taken apart by iSuppli, to have the Analogix ANX9836 HDMI/digital audio interface.
How relevant that is I'm not sure, but it sure gives the ATV superb sound quality.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101006PR200.html

shane · Post by **shane** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 3:47 pm

True enough, what goes around comes around. I guess this hits a raw nerve as someone who used to work preparing chip designs from design companies to be manufactured in a silicon foundry, who was made redundant when they all started going to Taiwan.
What it comes down to is that we're still as good as ever at having brilliant ideas, but we've given up being crap at making stuff from them!

pre65 · Post by **pre65** » Wed Oct 06, 2010 3:49 pm

If you watch Dragons Den there's plenty of people with crap ideas.

Cressy Snr · Post by **Cressy Snr** » Thu Nov 25, 2010 9:08 pm

iOS 4.1 for the Apple TV came out yesterday.

Thankfully it now respects the playlist order you originally set up in iTunes, instead
of arranging all the tracks alphabetically whether you liked it or not.
I always knew it was a bug....feature my arse

The sound quality via its optical digital output has taken something of a step forward too.

A very nice update.

Steve

Ray P · Post by **Ray P** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 7:09 am

Steve, you might find the latest newsletter from PS Audio of interest;

http://www.psaudio.com/ps/newsletters/n ... ewsletter/

First item is the tagNplay music manager, which looks to have the potential to be a really useful/powerful/flexible music library solution. I already use the tagNplay player on my iphone tp play local mp3 music files but also to stream from my home server (where I hold my music as FLAC in Asset UpnP, files are transcoded for playback on the iphone), preferring it to Itunes but with the music manager the overall capability should be much enhanced.

Connected to that there is a bit about using the Apple TV player with tagNplay.

Ray

audio-talk

Apple TV as Music Streamer.

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