Over the years the home appliance division of Sharp Electronics Corporation was a leader in manufacturing microwave ovens. Millions American kitchens enjoyed Sharp microwaves and “nucleing” food almost become a part of our American identity. Still, the entrepreneurial minds of Sharp’s never rested and now, Sharp is at the frontiers of bringing the new ways for us to enjoy the ordinary culinary things. We spoke with President of SEC and Chairman of the Board of Sharp Electronics Mr. Toshihiko Fujimoto about the new aggressive Sharp’s move and here is what he said:

“Our scientist explored all possible aspects of microwave cooking and we concluded that the most unpleasant experience a microwave user has while he or she is waiting when the food is being microwaved. A deep brainstorm of the dilemma by all 450000 of our employees revealed that if you exposed a microwave user to music listening experience while the food is microwaving then the entire microwaveing experience appears more attractive. So, we began to search how to combine a microwave with a jukebox. We contacted the most prominent minds of audio industry and recruited them to contribute their expertise and knowledge for masking our new future products: “Sharp’s Auditable Defroster”. The audio experts suggest use SACD technology in our new Auditable Defroster so we did.  We contacted EMM Labs, the company that pioneered the SACD, asking them to accommodate their technologies into our microwaves. “

According to Mr. Fujimoto EMM Labs people were very enthusiastic and their CEO Mr. Ed Meitner said: “My God! With this magnificent opportunity I can really accomplisher what I was dreaming for years! My initial wonderful DSD idea was 4-bit processing. Then, when we converted DSD to the consumer-oriented crap with marketing name SACD we make it 1-bit processing. And now for my “The Auditable Defroster” projects I can make sound 1/128-bit! The dream comes through…”

“So, embracing the EMM Labs new accomplishments”, - Mr. Toshihiko Fujimoto continued, -“ we incorporated the SAD (comes from “Sharp Auditable Defroster”) into our new microwaves and begun to make our pre-production tests. How big our surprise was when we learn that EMM Labs did more then we expected. One of our engineers was playing music via one of our excremental Auditable Defrosters during his lunch and suddenly he felt that a MilkyWays in his pocket begin to melt. He instantaneously alerted director of R&D. Further experimented suggested that EMM Labs’s Sound was not only capable to melt chocolate but also deep-fry chickens, boiled water, wither flowers, roost duck and make those marvels Lebanese shish-kebabs. Furthermore the Sound that EMM Labs produced, did all of this cooking ….without even activation our microwave engine! We were so impressed that we patented out new SAD as EMM’s SoundCook™ and immediately went for the mass production.”

Today, the EMM Labs’ SoundCook™ and Sharp SAD are widely popular among the gourmet kitchen across America. Thousands of Americans use the SoundCook™ to make popcorn and warm up yesterday’s hot dogs. The musical quality of the EMM Labs’ SoundCook™ are also not overlooked and nowadays the Carnegie Hall, MET, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Boston Symphonies explicitly use SoundCook™ in their lunch rooms to let the orchestra members to defrost their sandwich during the rehearsal breaks.

How great the future for the SAD?

We asked the  EMM Labs liaison, Mr. Jonathan Tinn. Jonathan said:

“Initially the EMM Labs’ SoundCook™ as the “Sharp Auditable Defroster” had difficult time to break into the market. It was so because our new revolutionary musical microwave changes the inner-stricture of the cooked meet and a costumer needed some education to understand it. EMM Labs approached me and asked me to use my expertise to address the needs for public education about the SoundCook™ technologies. Previously, before jointing the Auditable Defroster project I was running a slaughterhouse and was a first class butcher. I know exactly how to cut out of a cow the most saleable part of cow’s flash and how to conceal from a customer a faulty small of spoiled meet. EMM Labs had a number of good electricians but they never had the expertise of a good butter. With me in a staff, the EMM Labs’s customers could experiences the wonderful service coming from the world-class electricians, from you next-door butcher and of course form the marvel of the today’ home appliance – the EMM Labs’s and Sharp Electronics’ SoundCook™ Auditable Defroster, powdered by last generation of SACD”

Phil Gold wrote in his EMM review the following:

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/superioraudio/

The key consideration for any external DAC is how to minimize or eliminate jitter. We've seen analog Phase Locked Loops (PLLs), digital PLLs and RAM buffers. Ed Meitner discards all of these methods in favor of his new MFAST (Meitner Frequency Acquisition System) technology, an asynchronous method which simply discards the clock embedded in the original signal. I asked EMM Labs' Shahin Al Rashid to explain:

If the signal did not come in over Optilink, then the MDAT circuits in the DAC2 upsample it to 5.6mHz before passing it to the discreet dual differential DACs, unique to EMM Labs, for conversion to analog. Ed Meitner believes that all available DAC chips exhibit some degree of non linearity, and that his design aims can only be achieved with discreet components. And sorry, he is not willing to sell his DAC circuitry to any other manufacturers. If you want his solution, there's only one place to go to get it. We'll let the listening tests answer the $64,000 question – is he right?

So there's a large number of ways to get the digital signal in, only one of which will currently accept a truly high resolution signal. The USB signal is currently limited to a ceiling of 48 kHz and the AES, TosLink and Coax top out at 96 kHz. However, this is an upgradeable DAC (through its USB port) and you can expect future software upgrades to take you up to 192 kHz sampling frequencies.

This is a confusing explanation and I generally not a big fun of the EMM Labs sound. Whatever they do I consider that the DACs with mandatory rate conversion are faulty idea by default. Still, disregarding what EMM does sonically the Meitner’s designer intelligence must not be discarded and I would like to hear more about his MFAST method.