Telos Zephyr, User Manual

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Table of Contents 11
A Note From the President...
Waaay back in 1984, Telos’ first product was being designed on a Radio Shack TRS- 80
and the attached modem was considered to be respectably state- of- the- art, operating
at the impressive speed of 300 bits per second. This was nearly three times the speed of
the 110 bps, twenty- five pound, phone company- issue boxes I had been using over at
the local college campus to talk to the hulking IBM in the bomb- shelter basement.
The PC revolution had begun a few years back, so there were quite a few of them
around, but they were, except for by grace of these modems and mainframes, islands.
No one as yet had figured a way to link them up in any practical way.
How the world has changed! Politicians talking up the “Information Super Highway”
have made the phrase a parody, and 10 Million bits per second LANs are starting to be
thought of as kind of slow.
We radio broadcasters have until recently been only just a bit ahead of computer users a
decade ago. Our stations mostly exist as islands, with what audio we get from elsewhere
coming from the mainframe- like satellites and networks.
But now come the liberating technologies that do for us what networking is doing for
computing: digital telephony and high- power audio data coding. These make possible
the instant dial- up transportation of audio from and to anywhere in the modern world.
Digital telephone interconnection is being delivered to us via ISDN, and ISO/MPEG
Layer III is the perfect coding method to exploit it for high- fidelity audio.
With the Zephyr, we’ve tried to bring together gracefully these technological pieces to
permit you to easily do that which was previously difficult or impossible. It is my hope
that it becomes, in your hands, an empowering tool for the creation of a more
interesting audio future.
The Zephyr is a result of what were once my personal passions, and what have now
become what MBA types call our “core corporate competencies,” Digital Signal
Processing and telephones for broadcast. It feels as if everything we’ve done until now
have lead to this. Plug it in, dial it, listen, and see if you, too, don’t share the excitement
we felt in the lab when we got the first prototype going, listening to a Zappa CD being
played from our partner lab in Europe. It was absolutely mind- boggling – we were
hearing CD- quality audio from the other side of the planet
on a phone line .
God, I love the 90s!
Steve Church