The S&V Interview

That's rock legend Carlos Santana, succinctly summarizing two things at once: a) the fine art of making music worth listening to, and b) being able to hear that music as clearly as the artist intended. (To that end, Carlos and I wound up switching phone lines during the front end of our conversation in order to hear each other with a much better-sounding connection, but that's another story.)

A conversation with Tony Ostrom, president of the Wireless Speaker & Audio Association.

We’ve tracked the progress of the Wireless Speaker & Audio Association (WiSA) since its humble beginnings many years ago. A lot has changed since those early days when the Association showed up in a CES hotel room to demonstrate a home theater system devoid of speaker cables. It was a remarkable demo, not just because it worked, but because the enabling technology made it possible to send uncompressed 24-bit/96-kHz audio signals through the air from an AV receiver to seven speakers and a subwoofer. Today, wireless music is everywhere and better than ever but in those days transmitting hi-res audio wirelessly was a daunting task. It’s been a few years since we checked in with the Association so we caught up with WiSA president Tony Ostrom to get an update on the technology and the products it enables.

15 Minutes with Jon Kiachian, VP, Hearing Health Technologies at Knowles Corp.

Jon Kiachian has spent the past 16 years working with the likes of National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments in technology-management positions. Today he is a vice president and general manager at Knowles, the global company responsible for developing the tiny microphones that allowed us to hear sound from the surface of Mars earlier this year. Kiachian oversees the business unit that develops technology to improve sound quality in a variety of electronics devices — a pursuit that’s more important than ever as high-resolution (hi-res) music reaches the masses through the likes of Amazon, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz, and other streaming services. In his role at Knowles, Kiachian has become a hi-res evangelist of sorts who believes audiophiles are “duty bound” to convince the millions of listeners who settle for bad sound that there’s a better option — a way to make the music they love really come alive.