Hardware Podcasts

An Interview with Nash Reilly

The Amp Hour · 13 Jan 2020 · 1h 33m · Episode 474

What this episode covers

Nash Reilly, an electrical engineer at Sonos, discusses his work on products including the Port, the Amp, and the Move, detailing the technical challenges of audio design and emissions testing. He explains how high-speed digital signals, particularly I2S master clocks, create radiated emissions that require careful filtering and impedance management to pass compliance. Reilly also describes the complexities of discrete Class D amplifier design, focusing on minimizing startup pops and clicks to protect downstream equipment and ensure audio quality. Finally, he reflects on the company's evolution from a small startup to a large enterprise, highlighting the shift in vendor relationships and the importance of robust project management and team collaboration.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Sonos, Micron, Qualcomm, Intel, Analog Devices, Audio Precision
Products
Sonos Port, Sonos Amp, Sonos Move, Play 3, Play 1
Also
Sigma-Delta ADC, Sigma-Delta DAC, I2S, Class D Amplifier, Art of Electronics, High Speed Digital Design

Related episodes from other shows

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

  • How I Built This · 1h 00m

    Sonos: John MacFarlane

    John MacFarlane, co-founder and former CEO of Sonos, recounts the company's journey from a 2002 garage startup to a billion-dollar enterprise, detailing the technical challenges of creating a reliable wireless home audio system before Wi-Fi was mature. He explains how Sonos survived early skepticism, a hostile confrontation with Steve Jobs over patent infringement, and the market disruption caused by Amazon's Echo by doubling down on sound quality and integrating with voice assistants rather than building their own. MacFarlane also discusses the personal toll of leadership, his decision to step down in 2017 due to burnout, and his belief that timing and luck played a larger role in Sonos's success than hard work alone.

    Starting a product companyWireless & RF
    8 chapters

  • Coredump Sessions · 59m

    #022: How Two Dads Thoughtfully Scaled Yoto Into One of the Fastest Growing Kid Tech Brands

    Yoto co-founders Ben Drury and Filip Denker explain how they scaled their screen-free audio player for kids from a garage prototype to a global brand, balancing hardware durability, content licensing, and regulatory compliance. They discuss the evolution from Raspberry Pi prototypes to custom ESP32 hardware, the challenges of Wi-Fi connectivity and captive portals, and how they use fleet observability to manage millions of devices in the field. The conversation also covers Yoto's developer program, which allows community members to build interactive audio experiences, and their strategic use of AI for compliance and content generation while maintaining transparency.

    Scaling productionPrototyping & iteration
    9 chapters

  • Embedded.fm · 1h 10m

    398: Clocks Get Into Everything

    Tom Anderson, an engineer at Keysight Technologies who also consults for Alembic, explains the fundamentals of radio frequency (RF) electronics, clarifying that RF issues arise from voltage differentials on wires due to signal propagation delays. He demystifies RF jargon like dBm and Smith charts (which he calls 'dollhouses') and discusses practical design strategies, such as managing clock rise times, avoiding ground plane slots, and tuning antennas using varactors. The conversation also covers the specific electronic challenges of high-end bass guitars, including EMI shielding and signal-to-noise ratios.

    Wireless & RFPCB design & layout
    7 chapters

  • Oxide and Friends · 1h 40m

    Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries

    Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and the Oxide Computer Company team (Eric Aasen, Nathanael Huffman, Robert Keith, Arjen Roodselaar, Josh Clulow, CJ Mendez) detail their journey through EMC and safety compliance for their rack-scale computer. They discuss the challenges of pre-compliance testing in Texas, debugging a critical component mismatch in the 'shark fin' drive connectors, and surviving a catastrophic power-on failure that destroyed 14 FPGAs. The team ultimately passes FCC certification with minimal margin after addressing antenna effects in the rear doors and implementing spread spectrum clocking.

    Debugging & failure analysisCertification & compliance
    7 chapters

  • Oxide and Friends · 2h 07m

    More Tales from the Bringup Lab

    Bryan Cantrill and the Oxide Computer Company team, including Arjen Roodselaar, Eric Aasen, and Matt Keeter, detail the bring-up of Sidecar, a switching board based on the Intel Tofino 2 ASIC, and Gimlet, their compute node. They discuss the extreme difficulty of designing the Power Delivery Network (PDN) to handle 300-amp load steps with only 7 millivolts of margin, requiring a custom 'load slammer' for testing. The team also recounts debugging firmware and hardware issues, including TOML parsing errors, slew rate mismatches on SPI traces, and a critical 500-ohm pull-down resistor error on the T6 NIC that nearly halted production.

    PCB design & layoutDebugging & failure analysis
    10 chapters

The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by The Amp Hour. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.