Hello Everyone.
OK, where to start…. Maybe I start by when I was a teenager, going to my friend’s house and seeing and hearing his Reel-to-Reel and Turntable putting out music that was just heavenly. I think I was only 10 or 12 years old (we are talking early 1970s here). My other brother who is two years older than me was also there and we both fell in love with “hi-fi.” As you can imagine, it was hard getting our parents to pony up money for our newly found expensive hobby. Still, we were pretty persuasive and eventually got to have a decent set of hardware.
In parallel, driven by my oldest brother’s interest and experience, we got into analog electronics. I built some amps and other gadgets and naturally pursued a degree in electrical engineering. Meanwhile, personal computers were just coming out and I got passion around them which nearly displaced my interest in audio. We are talking early 1980s here. Fortunately, during college I took a job repairing electronics gear for the local hi-fi store so I had plenty of access to nice gear, including ability to keep and repair stuff people didn’t want to repair include reel-to-reel tape decks, amps, etc. Still, nothing all that fancy. The love was squarely into computers.
My initial job after getting my EE degree was in building operating system software for large computer systems. Later I landed a job at Sony running the workstation R&D group in California. I left that after five years, moving on to manage engineering groups at a couple of companies building video gear for professional markets (TV studios/networks, post production/effects, etc). Learn a ton about fundamentals of what makes video right.
I see the Internet coming so I go and join a Stanford-university start-up doing video streaming on the Internet before people had heard of such a concept (we are talking about people still using “28K” dial-up modems with “56k” modems not yet in the market!). The venture got the interest of Microsoft and we were acquired by them in 1997 with the condition that I and other execs move up to Seattle. That we did.
Fast forward a decade later and I am managing an army of engineers, marketing people and legal/business development (1000+ people!) creating all the audio/video/imaging technologies coming out of Microsoft (sans Media Center). A third of the way there, I decided it might be important to not only have technology in Windows but also outside in devices that even competed with the operating system that paid my salary. So began a journey to get the consumer electronics industry to adopt our audio formats (WMA, WMA Pro, etc.) and video (WMV9/VC-1). Whether we were lucky or good, I don’t know but we managed to get everyone other than Apple to support these technologies
. One of the most memorable wins was sitting across from Kutaragi-san (creator of PlayStation franchise at Sony) and having him make the decision on the spot to support our technology in PSP and PS3. Next memorable event was explaining this win to my then boss who headed the Xbox group at the time . But it went well as we had pretty strong support from “BillG” (Bill Gates).
During this affair, I manage to put together a superb team of researchers and practitioners of audio/video. This included a high-end listening room ($300K budget!) and ability to conduct extensive blind and on-blind listening tests. I became a “trained listener” able to provide critical feedback to the audio team as they developed and optimized audio systems. Combined with my engineering experience and knowledge, I feel at ease talking about subjective and objective aspects of audio. My focus at home as far as gear though is mostly analytical with me being as proud of my $25K audio analyzer as one of you would be of your $25K amp. Headphones and expensive ones at that rule although there are Revel speakers and such for general enjoyment. I also love the concept of great sounding bookshelf monitors in near-field listening mode.
In 2007, I decided my tour of duty at Microsoft had ended with the massive organizational change post Vista shipping. Bill had decided to retire from Microsoft and focus on his charity work (where I think he will make a bigger mark on the planet than he did at Microsoft). So I created a transition plan to have my groups move elsewhere and left the company hoping to start a new one. It has been two years in the making and as much as I like to say I have started it already, we still haven’t. My partner by the way, is Warren Lieberfarb. For those of you who don’t know him, he was the head of Warner Home Video for 25 years and is credited for being the “father of DVD.” Both of us have a crazy desire to change the way people do things in radical ways. Since big plans require big resources, in a down economy, it has been challenging to close our transactions but we are working at it. When it happens I will disclose what I can here. Suffice it to say, it is related to technologies we talk about here.
Meanwhile, not being one that likes to sit around, I started to study and learn about home automation. Along the way, my older brother who I mentioned above asked if it would make sense to get in that business after watching me do so many things different than the typical integration companies. Late last year, we did just that. I started a new company called Madrona Digital in Bellevue, Washington (stone throw from Microsoft). We are working on showroom right now and hope to have pretty decent gear once it is complete. Yes, once more I am making audio/video my “job”.
This gets me to an important point. I believe strongly in full disclosure when it comes to forum participation. I was the only industry “insider” at AVS for example to fully disclose my background and identity (which came with pretty high risks being a Microsoft executive with customers and reporters reading the forum and contacting others at the company). By the same token, I want to be very clear on this: this forum has nothing to do with my commercial interest in home automation/Audio&Video integration. While we have not yet fully decided what lines we carry, when we do, I will be very clear in my postings when I refer to anything where I might have conflict of interest.
You should feel comfortable discussing any brand or product you like here without worry about my affiliation otherwise through the above venture. If at any time you feel otherwise, please call me on it or if you worry about doing so in public, discuss it with Steve. This is your forum, not mine!
All of that said, I hope that my business, as with Microsoft and other companies I worked at, would enable me to gather data/get information that would otherwise be difficult for you to have. In that regard, hopefully this apparent conflict of interest could in practice be a positive thing.
On a personal level, I am a forum/research junkie. I don’t spend one penny without researching the web to see what others have to say. I hate buying something and then finding out there was a better/cheaper way. I think forums are a hidden jewel of the Internet. There is more knowledge in them than commercial sites. If we can one day harvest that energy and present it to people in a way they can digest it (rather than having to do so by rummaging through millions of posts), we will have served a great purpose. The name of the forum and focus of it has been driven from this motivation.
OK, where to start…. Maybe I start by when I was a teenager, going to my friend’s house and seeing and hearing his Reel-to-Reel and Turntable putting out music that was just heavenly. I think I was only 10 or 12 years old (we are talking early 1970s here). My other brother who is two years older than me was also there and we both fell in love with “hi-fi.” As you can imagine, it was hard getting our parents to pony up money for our newly found expensive hobby. Still, we were pretty persuasive and eventually got to have a decent set of hardware.
In parallel, driven by my oldest brother’s interest and experience, we got into analog electronics. I built some amps and other gadgets and naturally pursued a degree in electrical engineering. Meanwhile, personal computers were just coming out and I got passion around them which nearly displaced my interest in audio. We are talking early 1980s here. Fortunately, during college I took a job repairing electronics gear for the local hi-fi store so I had plenty of access to nice gear, including ability to keep and repair stuff people didn’t want to repair include reel-to-reel tape decks, amps, etc. Still, nothing all that fancy. The love was squarely into computers.
My initial job after getting my EE degree was in building operating system software for large computer systems. Later I landed a job at Sony running the workstation R&D group in California. I left that after five years, moving on to manage engineering groups at a couple of companies building video gear for professional markets (TV studios/networks, post production/effects, etc). Learn a ton about fundamentals of what makes video right.
I see the Internet coming so I go and join a Stanford-university start-up doing video streaming on the Internet before people had heard of such a concept (we are talking about people still using “28K” dial-up modems with “56k” modems not yet in the market!). The venture got the interest of Microsoft and we were acquired by them in 1997 with the condition that I and other execs move up to Seattle. That we did.
Fast forward a decade later and I am managing an army of engineers, marketing people and legal/business development (1000+ people!) creating all the audio/video/imaging technologies coming out of Microsoft (sans Media Center). A third of the way there, I decided it might be important to not only have technology in Windows but also outside in devices that even competed with the operating system that paid my salary. So began a journey to get the consumer electronics industry to adopt our audio formats (WMA, WMA Pro, etc.) and video (WMV9/VC-1). Whether we were lucky or good, I don’t know but we managed to get everyone other than Apple to support these technologies
. One of the most memorable wins was sitting across from Kutaragi-san (creator of PlayStation franchise at Sony) and having him make the decision on the spot to support our technology in PSP and PS3. Next memorable event was explaining this win to my then boss who headed the Xbox group at the time . But it went well as we had pretty strong support from “BillG” (Bill Gates). During this affair, I manage to put together a superb team of researchers and practitioners of audio/video. This included a high-end listening room ($300K budget!) and ability to conduct extensive blind and on-blind listening tests. I became a “trained listener” able to provide critical feedback to the audio team as they developed and optimized audio systems. Combined with my engineering experience and knowledge, I feel at ease talking about subjective and objective aspects of audio. My focus at home as far as gear though is mostly analytical with me being as proud of my $25K audio analyzer as one of you would be of your $25K amp
. Headphones and expensive ones at that rule although there are Revel speakers and such for general enjoyment. I also love the concept of great sounding bookshelf monitors in near-field listening mode.In 2007, I decided my tour of duty at Microsoft had ended with the massive organizational change post Vista shipping. Bill had decided to retire from Microsoft and focus on his charity work (where I think he will make a bigger mark on the planet than he did at Microsoft). So I created a transition plan to have my groups move elsewhere and left the company hoping to start a new one. It has been two years in the making and as much as I like to say I have started it already, we still haven’t. My partner by the way, is Warren Lieberfarb. For those of you who don’t know him, he was the head of Warner Home Video for 25 years and is credited for being the “father of DVD.” Both of us have a crazy desire to change the way people do things in radical ways. Since big plans require big resources, in a down economy, it has been challenging to close our transactions but we are working at it. When it happens I will disclose what I can here. Suffice it to say, it is related to technologies we talk about here.
Meanwhile, not being one that likes to sit around, I started to study and learn about home automation. Along the way, my older brother who I mentioned above asked if it would make sense to get in that business after watching me do so many things different than the typical integration companies. Late last year, we did just that. I started a new company called Madrona Digital in Bellevue, Washington (stone throw from Microsoft). We are working on showroom right now and hope to have pretty decent gear once it is complete. Yes, once more I am making audio/video my “job”
.This gets me to an important point. I believe strongly in full disclosure when it comes to forum participation. I was the only industry “insider” at AVS for example to fully disclose my background and identity (which came with pretty high risks being a Microsoft executive with customers and reporters reading the forum and contacting others at the company). By the same token, I want to be very clear on this: this forum has nothing to do with my commercial interest in home automation/Audio&Video integration. While we have not yet fully decided what lines we carry, when we do, I will be very clear in my postings when I refer to anything where I might have conflict of interest.
You should feel comfortable discussing any brand or product you like here without worry about my affiliation otherwise through the above venture. If at any time you feel otherwise, please call me on it or if you worry about doing so in public, discuss it with Steve. This is your forum, not mine!
All of that said, I hope that my business, as with Microsoft and other companies I worked at, would enable me to gather data/get information that would otherwise be difficult for you to have. In that regard, hopefully this apparent conflict of interest could in practice be a positive thing.
On a personal level, I am a forum/research junkie. I don’t spend one penny without researching the web to see what others have to say. I hate buying something and then finding out there was a better/cheaper way. I think forums are a hidden jewel of the Internet. There is more knowledge in them than commercial sites. If we can one day harvest that energy and present it to people in a way they can digest it (rather than having to do so by rummaging through millions of posts), we will have served a great purpose. The name of the forum and focus of it has been driven from this motivation.
