Audion

The Audion was an electronic amplifying vacuum tube invented by American electrical engineer Lee De Forest in 1906. It was the first triode, consisting of a partially evacuated glass tube containing three electrodes; a heated filament, a grid, and a plate. It is important in the history of technology because it was the first widely used electrical device which could amplify; a small electrical signal applied to the grid could control a larger current flowing from the filament to plate.

Unlike later vacuum tubes, the primitive Audion had a small amount of gas in the tube, thought to be necessary by De Forest, which limited the dynamic range and gave it nonlinear characteristics and erratic performance. Originally developed as a radio receiver detector by adding a grid electrode to the Fleming valve, it found little use until its amplifying ability was recognized around 1912 by several researchers, who used it to build the first amplifying radio receivers and electronic oscillators. The many practical applications for amplification motivated its rapid development, and the original Audion was superseded within a few years by improved versions with higher vacuum, developed by Irving Langmuir at GE and others. These were the first modern "hard vacuum" triodes.

Larry Fast

Lawrence Roger 'Larry' Fast (born 10 December 1951) is a synthesizer expert and composer. He is best known for Synergy, his 1975–1987 series of synthesizer music albums, and for his contributions to a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, and Hall and Oates.

Biography

Fast grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in History. There he took his previous training in piano and violin and melded them with computer science to become interested in synthesized music and to build his own primitive sound-making electronic devices.

He was introduced to Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from the band Yes during a local radio interview, and traveled to the UK to work with Yes on their 1974 album Tales from Topographic Oceans. It was there that he got a recording contract with Passport Records.

The Synergy project

Fast recorded a series of pioneering synthesizer music albums under the project name Synergy. Some of this work was used as the basis for music in Commodore 64 and Amiga computer games, notably Rob Hubbard's score for the C64 version of Zoids, which was an unofficial cover of Synergy's Ancestors from the 1981 album Audion.

Audion (software)

Audion is an audio player by Panic. It was originally a commercial (shareware) program, but with the dominance of Apple's iTunes, development was halted and it was released as freeware.

Design

One of the features of Audion that set it apart from its rivals, particularly SoundJam, was its user interface, which featured transparency through a process that mimicked the functionality of alpha channels on Mac OS 9's QuickDraw, a graphics system that did not support them.

History

Cabel Sasser has written that he and Steven Frank had one goal with Audion: "we wanted to listen to our music CDs on our computers while we worked, and we wanted it to be stylish." During Audion's development, MP3 files became a popular means of listening to music on a computer, and Panic licensed an MP3 decoder for incorporation into Audion.

Audion was originally conceived as one piece in a set of small applications to be called PanicPack, but time constraints led to the release of Audion 1.0 as standalone application on August 16, 1999.