Zaxcom patent infringement question

Just stumbled across this Gerald Undone video from December 1st comparing the Zoom F2 and the Tentacle Track E. He addresses that the US version of the Tentacle mutes/disables the headphone out while recording. He also says the Zoom's headphone out on the pre-production model he was using was functioning while recording, so he reached out to Zoom and they replied, "The unit in your possession operates the way the final one will. There is only one version for all customers in the world...".
 
JAMedia said:
I assume you also invited the other One missing voice:- Zoom who have had to make two versions..... and Tascam and the others whilst we are at it.
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Would be very very interesting to invite JuicedLink to hear their side as well.... or maybe they're silenced and legally unable to speak because of Zaxcom??
 
BrianMurphy said:
Certainly both Zoom and Tascam not small companies at all could see the value in offering an unencumbered device to the American market? So help me understand why Zoom and Tascam would "cheap out"?
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As I've said before, we're in an extremely extremely small niche of a niche market.

The fact Tascam is a "large" company, doesn't matter.

How many Zaxcom ZFR400 do you reckon get sold each year? Not many.

And the percentage of sales the likes of a DR10L makes out of Tascam's total sales revenue is minuscule, a rounding error by their accountants.

The zillions of dollars it would cost to successfully launch a legal case wouldn't be worth it. Not even if it would mean they could double or even triple the numbers of their sales.

We're not discussing mass market products like an iPod here.
 
IronFilm said:
As I've said before, we're in an extremely extremely small niche of a niche market.

The fact Tascam is a "large" company, doesn't matter.

How many Zaxcom ZFR400 do you reckon get sold each year? Not many.

And the percentage of sales the likes of a DR10L makes out of Tascam's total sales revenue is minuscule, a rounding error by their accountants.

The zillions of dollars it would cost to successfully launch a legal case wouldn't be worth it. Not even if it would mean they could double or even triple the numbers of their sales.

We're not discussing mass market products like an iPod here.
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How many Zaxcom ZFR400 do you reckon get sold each year? Not many.

I am not suggesting launching a legal case at all. I am suggesting they simply cut a deal with Zaxcom for the USA market and be done with it. They are gonna sell them there anyway, why bother to version for all the reasons you stated above.
 
combatentropy said:
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That's an excellent video. This topic does speak to that larger issue of innovation being stifled IP law. From my cursory understanding Zaxcom high end wireless mics happened to be first to this area. They developed and patented a technology to solve the problem of drop outs by recording while transmitting. Simultaneously you have digital recorders reducing in size and price where they start competing with wireless lav. Zoom H1 recorder quickly became a popular choice for wedding and other lower budget filming. The obvious leap would be to combine the two. The main purpose would be as a backup. We've seen this same thing happen with mixers thank goodness some company didn't jump in with a patent to stop the combination of the audio recorder and mixer.

This issue doesn't effect me so much but I'm sure it happens more than we're aware of.
 
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BrianMurphy said:
How many Zaxcom ZFR400 do you reckon get sold each year? Not many.

I am not suggesting launching a legal case at all. I am suggesting they simply cut a deal with Zaxcom for the USA market and be done with it. They are gonna sell them there anyway, why bother to version for all the reasons you stated above.
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Why pay Zaxcom anything? There is no need. Anyone who really wants a global version Tascam or Zoom unit can get one from elsewhere

Besides why would they pay a fee for something they already have that is prior art?
IF the Zaxcom patent was credible they would also have got a EU Patent and cleaned up in the larger European market.
Normally if you have a credible patent in one area it is reasonably easy to get it in another area.
 
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Paul F said:
The PTAB then found that Zaxcom sufficiently demonstrated industry praise of the claimed invention stating that “[t]he Emmy award praises the ‘replacing’ feature recited by the proposed substitute claims.” Id., at 64. Weighed together as a whole, the PTAB concluded that “the factors of long-felt need and especially industry praise weigh heavily in favor of nonobviousness,” and thus determined the amended claims to be patentable. Id. at 72.
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This is just non-sensical. Why does winning an Emmy have anything to do with the validity of a patent claim? The claim should be based solely on industry practice and technical innovation. It was common at the time the patent was issued for people to record an audio signal and wirelessly transmit that signal to a camera. As far as recording a signal in a transmitter, there was no technical innovation there by Zaxcom. They used commonly used chips to accomplish it. I could potentially support them having a patent on specific ways of replacing dropouts with recorded audio. But the notion that they OWN the idea of recording at a source and then wirelessly transmitting that signal is absurd. In fact, anyone who live streams an event from the camera while recording it at the same time would be in violation of the overly broad Zaxcom patent.
 
So, in my personal FU to Zaxcom, I have spoken with a WELL known custom audio cable manufacturer* about my adapter cable to split a lav to both my Lectro beltpack and to the Tentacle Track E and they got back to me after some brief investigation and said it should work no problem and have quoted me the price for the adapter cable(a reasonable ~$65/each). The only gotcha, so far, they told me the adapter cables have to be purpose built for each model of lav, because of the routing of the wiring to the TRS connector. So I will start out with a couple for my Sanken’s only, since that is the vast majority of what I use and if completely successful, I may add a few for my B6’s(only have two, anyway) and Trams.



*One of my regular audio dealers was unable to tell me if it was possible, even after speaking to Sanken, but these guys build cables and adapters for everything, so they usually know if something is possible or not and more importantly if it will work.
 
Run&Gun said:
So, in my personal FU to Zaxcom, I have spoken with a WELL known custom audio cable manufacturer* about my adapter cable to split a lav to both my Lectro beltpack and to the Tentacle Track E and they got back to me after some brief investigation and said it should work no problem and have quoted me the price for the adapter cable(a reasonable ~$65/each). The only gotcha, so far, they told me the adapter cables have to be purpose built for each model of lav, because of the routing of the wiring to the TRS connector. So I will start out with a couple for my Sanken’s only, since that is the vast majority of what I use and if completely successful, I may add a few for my B6’s(only have two, anyway) and Trams.
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I don't know if or how well that will work, but I will confirm that different microphones do have different wiring to transmitters. Each transmitter expects one thing, each microphone expects something, and getting the two to work can require some oddities. Usually not some much messing around with TRS, but when you get into 4 pins you can get different bias supplies, and weird stuff. Also each microphone has an ideal range for the bias voltage. We had a Sabine 2.4ghz system many years ago that had a really low bias voltage, we had the worst luck trying to find condenser microphones that would sound decent, dynamic worked great, but hard to find a small lav in dynamic.

All that said, it should not be a great leap of faith (or intellect) to determine that having a wireless mic record a safety track is something that can be done (easily). There's that "obvious" part that seems to be lacking in the patent application process. Kind of surprised that his patent still exists, could Zaxcom really have that much money to fend off Sennheiser, Sure, etc.?
 
Greg_E said:
Kind of surprised that his patent still exists, could Zaxcom really have that much money to fend off Sennheiser, Sure, etc.?
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If the patent had any merit they would have also filed it in the EU. The EU is a bigger market than the USA. However the EU Patent system is a bit more rigorous.
That they didn't file it inthe EU speaks volumes no matter how much the Zaxcom fanboys equivocate.
 
Greg_E said:
I don't know if or how well that will work, but I will confirm that different microphones do have different wiring to transmitters. Each transmitter expects one thing, each microphone expects something, and getting the two to work can require some oddities. Usually not some much messing around with TRS, but when you get into 4 pins you can get different bias supplies, and weird stuff. Also each microphone has an ideal range for the bias voltage. We had a Sabine 2.4ghz system many years ago that had a really low bias voltage, we had the worst luck trying to find condenser microphones that would sound decent, dynamic worked great, but hard to find a small lav in dynamic.

All that said, it should not be a great leap of faith (or intellect) to determine that having a wireless mic record a safety track is something that can be done (easily). There's that "obvious" part that seems to be lacking in the patent application process. Kind of surprised that his patent still exists, could Zaxcom really have that much money to fend off Sennheiser, Sure, etc.?
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Well, hopefully I will have the cables and Tentacles in sometime this week and will be able to find out for sure if it will work as envisioned. But considering Remote Audio is the one I ran this by(eventually after my other dealer couldn't give me a definitive answer) and they are the ones building the cables, hopefully they would have warned me if this was not going to work. BUT sometimes you just don't know until you do it. Who remembers the unforeseen problems and headaches Lectrosonics caused when they switched their belt packs over to the servo bias wiring? I shipped back two sets of belt packs(4) and at least one SR receiver and had them exchanged, because there was so much noise we thought everything was F'd up. Not even the dealers knew what was going on, at first. Eventually Lectro was like, oh yeah, we changed the design of the belt packs. You need to wire the lav's differently. I still have a set of 'non-servo bias' belt packs. You have to make sure the lav's wired for those packs STAY with those packs and those packs only. Almost gave one of my audio guys a heart attack one day when he grabbed the wrong lav's on a big shoot where we were running about four or five channels of wireless.


JAMedia said:
If the patent had any merit they would have also filed it in the EU. The EU is a bigger market than the USA. However the EU Patent system is a bit more rigorous.
That they didn't file it inthe EU speaks volumes no matter how much the Zaxcom fanboys equivocate.
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I saw a good one over on JW Sound recently: "Zaxcommunists".
 
Well, sadly, the splitter cables do not work as envisioned. They do technically work, but the level from the lav drops and extraneous noise is introduced when you raise it. Started playing around with it after I listened to it to see if I could figure out anything on my own and if you just plug the lav into the splitter and then only into the Lectro belt pack, there is no signal going into the Lectro. Plug the splitter into both and still nothing. Turn on the mic power in the Track E and then you have signal to both, albeit it's low and with added noise. And here is the strange part, unplug it from the Lectro and leave it only in the Track E and it sounds fine. So it does work as a TA5-to-3.5mm adapter, but you can find dedicated adapters for much less on Amazon.

I'm curious if they wired the splitter to not take/block power from the Lectro? I guess I'll call Remote Audio on Monday and see if they have any ideas based on the above or if this is just a dead-end. I am a little disappointed. I was cautiously optimistic and I like the Track E's after playing around with them(just received them yesterday). Even if they can't figure out a way to split the lav's cleanly and with enough signal, I'll probably still hang onto the Track E's. BTW: even though I haven't done any serious listening(I did use my dual driver Westone's, though), the lav that Tentacle includes, doesn't sound bad. I think you could cut it in with COS-11's and the like with very little effort.
 
Run&Gun said:
Well, sadly, the splitter cables do not work as envisioned. They do technically work, but the level from the lav drops and extraneous noise is introduced when you raise it. Started playing around with it after I listened to it to see if I could figure out anything on my own and if you just plug the lav into the splitter and then only into the Lectro belt pack, there is no signal going into the Lectro. Plug the splitter into both and still nothing. Turn on the mic power in the Track E and then you have signal to both, albeit it's low and with added noise. And here is the strange part, unplug it from the Lectro and leave it only in the Track E and it sounds fine. So it does work as a TA5-to-3.5mm adapter, but you can find dedicated adapters for much less on Amazon.

I'm curious if they wired the splitter to not take/block power from the Lectro? I guess I'll call Remote Audio on Monday and see if they have any ideas based on the above or if this is just a dead-end. I am a little disappointed. I was cautiously optimistic and I like the Track E's after playing around with them(just received them yesterday). Even if they can't figure out a way to split the lav's cleanly and with enough signal, I'll probably still hang onto the Track E's. BTW: even though I haven't done any serious listening(I did use my dual driver Westone's, though), the lav that Tentacle includes, doesn't sound bad. I think you could cut it in with COS-11's and the like with very little effort.
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Ah bummer man. We had high hopes. Oh well, not confirmed there is no other solution yet with Remote Audio. Keep us posted.
 
Battery powered amp might be needed, but extra bulk. I don't think you can get enough current to power a "simple" amp from the bias current sources on either device.
 
BrianMurphy said:
Newsshooter.com just posted another review that seems to answer my question. Though the unit they evaluated was purchased in Japan, they state that Zoom do not make a USA only version.
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Yet that is demonstrably not true. I seem to recall two part numbers and US Web sites having one part number and everywhere else having a different one.
 
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