About the Author

Ronald Quan, a resident of Cupertino, California, has a BSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley and is a member of SMPTE, IEEE, and AES. He has worked as a broadcast engineer for FM and AM radio stations, and for over 30 years he has worked for video and audio equipment companies (Ampex, Sony Corporation, Monster Cable, and Macrovision). Mr. Quan designed wide-band FM detectors for an HDTV tape recorder at Sony, and a twice color subcarrier frequency (7.16 MHz) differential phase measurement system for Macrovision, where he was a principal engineer. Also, at Hewlett Packard he developed a family of low-powered bar code readers that drained a fraction of the power consumed by conventional light pen readers.

Mr. Quan holds at least 70 U.S. patents in the areas of analog video processing, low-noise amplifier design, low-distortion voltage-controlled amplifiers, wide-band crystal voltage-controlled oscillators, video monitors, audio and video IQ modulation, in-band carrier audio single-sideband modulation and demodulation, audio and video scrambling, bar code reader products, and audio test equipment. In 2005 he was a guest speaker at the Stanford University Electrical Engineering Department’s graduate seminar, talking on lower noise and distortion voltage-controlled amplifier topologies. In November 2010 he presented a paper on amplifier distortion to the Audio Engineering Society’s conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.