So, for me, sound of music is one of the most important things. That's how I escaped.
If I'm going for a run or whatever, you can listen to music and it kind of removes
you from the monotony of life which is, it's pretty special. My dad was an
electronics engineer so I was constantly surrounded by electronics - changing plugs
at the age of three. So, as as I grew up, I started doing Audio Engineering with my
dad. I was just fortunate enough to get into the industry to take kind of both
my loves of engineering, electronics, music and then putting them together.
Vox started off just a couple of guys making some amps and then in the
60s, Vox really took off because they gave a load of amps to a band that no one had
ever heard of called "The Beatles". At that point, they became a bit of a global
phenomenon and Vox came along with that too.
Vox has its own unique scent and what makes us different is a couple of
circuit topologies which, when they were designed, didn't really exist. That's what.
The key thing is there are no negative feedback loop in the power amp. And what
that means is you get some haze and distortion. The other thing that we're
really famous for is the classic Vox chime and Vox Chime's this kind of just
really high-end, sparkly sound and there's no one else there to do it but Vox.
Me and my team, we have complete ownership of product from concept all the
way through to final design and it kind of gives you that full ownership and
which is really fantastic 'cause you've really invested in what you've done. When you're
designing tube amplifiers, you have to be very careful about clearances because of
high voltages and things like that. So, one of the really powerful things that we
can use it for is actually to use these rules and allocate these rules to
specific nets. So, we want that net knowing that some high voltage to have a
minimum of one millimeter clearance. And you can do this on a net by net basis
which is really useful rather than having to do it through the PCB and not
knowing necessarily which are the high voltage nets. You can actually do it
through the schematics and ask those rules directly to the online and design
rules checker on the PCB. When I was demonstrated Altium Designer, that's
kind of the thing that stood out for me is the fact - it just worked! I didn't have
multiple screens and multiple programs open. I had one unified environment that
did everything I needed. Whether that was simulation, whether that was schematic
design, whether that was PCB design, everything was there. And for me, that was
the main draw and yeah, I've never really looked back since, to be honest. This was designed a
limited edition for our 60th anniversary and we made this in the UK. And as you
can see, it's completely hand-wired, no PCBs whatsoever. But don't let it fool
you because this was designed entirely on Altium Designer. To the schematics,
to the simulations, to every single turret board was designed with Altium
Designer -wiring, diagrams, everything! So, even though Altium Designer's super
high-tech, we were still able to repurpose it and make stuff that looks like very
very old, things like that. But as you can see, it's more of an art form.
There's no need for us to do it like this but
look at it, it looks great! But to be going from that to something
like this which is our mini Super Beetle and this is a 50-watt guitar amp. It's kind
of fun that we're able to use Altium Designer to design things like
this which has got CPUs in there, this has got built-in reverb, it's got DSP,
Class D power amp, it's got vacuum valves, it's got op amps, it kind of covers the
whole audio spectrum as far as topologies are concerned, to this old thing
here which is about as simple and back-to-basics as an amp can possibly be.
So, Altium Designer really can be used for both things. In 2016, I went to my
first class and group. I went with a whole bunch of old school friends I hadn't
seen for years and they said, "Well, what is it you do?" We were at the Pyramid stage
and there was a band playing on the stage and one of my amps was on stage
and I said, well, if you just look to the right-hand side of that guitarist, that
amp he's playing, oh yeah I designed that amp. And they were just - What! and I was like
yeah so that amp and that one over there as well. They are both designs
that came out. So it was yeah, were the amazing two minutes!
So, the design challenges are always trying to take the old and adding the
new but keeping true to our kind of heritage. So, the design
challenges that we have will always be taking something old, keeping
our client base happy. But then adding in maybe something under the hood, maybe
they don't even notice it, maybe that's the best kind of technology. Maybe the
technology is completely transparent but it benefits the product without people
even noticing it. So, that, for us is something we'll always want to be keen on doing.
Every time we add new technology into something, you always have to have a
benefit to the end-user and frankly, if they don't even notice that, that's great!
Because we've done our job. My advice is, listen to the senior
engineers and learn as much as you can. It's a really fun industry and it's a really
fun thing to create because what you're creating is a tool for other people to
be creative. Altium Designer helps me reduce
my time to market by about 50% and frankly, that's why I choose Altium.