Cody Dowling
Principal & Founder
Hi! I’m Cody Dowling, an Electrical Engineer and audio enthusiast who has been involved in audio, in one way or another, for more than 20 years. If you want the short, bullet-ed version of the verbiage below, check out my LinkedIn page, here. If not, or if you’re just looking for some reading material, keep reading! 🙂
Biography:
Starting Out…
My audio career started (as it does for many young audio enthusiasts) in the car audio domain. As a young teenager, I was always amazed by how loud the cars and trucks cruising the neighborhood could blare the music favored by my older brother and his friends. I discovered I had a knack for “hooking up systems”, as it was called, and soon I became that chubby nerd that hooked up everybody’s sound systems in his Dad’s garage. This love of cool music, awe for loud sound systems, and natural aptitude in audio electronics would soon lead to part-time jobs running soundboards at church, school, and for some local sound-production companies in Houston and the surrounding areas.
At University…
After knocking around a few different fields of study in college and burning through a fair share of academic scholarships, I determined that, since a microphone turned sound into electricity, and a speaker turned electricity into sound, the very best way to become the ultimate sound guy was to become an electrical engineer. So I moved to College Station and got serious about getting an EE degree with dual disciplines in Power Electronics & Micro Electronics. It was here that I discovered integrated circuit design and an affinity for high-efficiency inverters. It all came together when I recognized that the large power electronic inverters I was researching for use with Hydrogen Fuel Cells were really just fixed-frequency Class D amplifiers, and that Class D amplifiers were simply very high-fidelity asynchronous buck converters.
Professional Career…
I’ve been fortunate in my career to have been on product development teams responsible for:
- The I-Tech and XTI pro-audio amplifier lines from Crown Audio
- The Mark Levinson No. 53 Reference Amplifier
- The Class H Amplifier chipset used in Harman’s Greenedge audio system for the Toyota Camry (and other models)
- The very first boosted Class D chip amplifier used in the Apple iPhone
- A myriad of products from TI used in Flat Panel TVs, Sound Bars, Powered Subwoofers, Gaming Machines, Bluetooth Speakers, WiFi Speakers, E-Call Systems, and SmartSpeakers
I feel very blessed to have been able to work on everything from DSP-enabled 10kW amplifiers used by U2 to 1W chip amps used in the best selling mobile phone in history. During that time I’ve architected several high-performance CODECs as well as developed audio processing algorithms that make small loudspeakers sound amazing.
Over the last 15 years, my responsibilities have spanned from product development/design, to application engineering, and finally to Systems Engineering/Architecture for audio ICs. Of course, the technical acumen goes hand in hand with this career path, but I’ve also had a fair share of Technical Marketing experience, collateral generation for technical documentation and illustration, and critical listening and tuning. I’d now like to put that experience to work for you.
I hope this tells you a little bit about me, but if there is anything I’ve missed or you’d like to find out more, please fee free to contact me.
Best Regards,
Cody Dowling