Curriculum Vitae Christian Wiesner

• Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1976
• Member of the Gewandhaus Kinderchor from 1981 to 1992
• Primary and Secondary School from 1982 to 1995
• Civilian Service at the Malteser Hilfsdienst from 1995 to 1996
• Started a Masters Degree in 1996 at the University of Leipzig: Musicology, Philosophy and Business Administration.

Actually I wanted to study Audio Engineer at the Filmuniversität Potsdam. They had an acceptance test where you had to perform an instrument and show your skills in music theory. I wanted to use this time to improve on these things.

• Worked as a intern for Radio Leipzig 91,3
• Worked as a stagehand for various concerts
• Left Leipzig in 1998 and started studying Mediatechnology at the Technical University of Ilmenau

I dropped my dreams of being an audio engineer. That's okay.

• In 2002 I built the Midimonster.

Because I needed it. For my live gigs with a friend we needed a central MIDI-clock, which could be routed to two ports and independently started. So I joined a course in Microcontroller Programming at the University, learned Eagle, routed a PCB, etched it myself in my dorm, programmed the firmware and finally we had a working model, which we used during multiple gigs.

Also this set my love for anything hardware, be it layout or embedded programming. I wanted to make a profession out of it. So I choose anything with hardware development in my further studies.

• Did a study-related internship at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology from 2003 to 2004.

I set up an audio-demo-lab for the IOSONO Wavefield-Synthesis system Fraunhofer was working on. And I created a hardware which could convert digital ADAT audio to eight analog channels.

• Continued to work part-time at Fraunhofer from 2004 to 2006.

I installed IOSONO-Systems at the Seebühne Bregenz, the University of Surrey and on other top secret locations (not kidding)

• Did another study-related Project in 2005, the MIDI-over-LAN-Project

The University needed a solution to route MIDI-Data over long distances (longer than 10m) for their studio and wanted to use the LAN for this. A student fellow and me used built two hardware devices to accomplish it.

We chose the Ethernut-Solution as a hardware platform. These open-source PCBs could route data over Ethernet, the stack was running on an 8-bit Atmel Processor. I created a PCB to connect MIDI, a display and a keypad to the base-PCB. My friend did the coding part. We sent the data over UDP and relied on the quality of the University Network. It worked, we could programm a Clavia Micro Modular over LAN.

• Wrote my thesis from 2006 to 2007 at NTI Audio in Schaan, Liechtenstein

The topic was "Measuring Jitter on AES-3 digital audio signals". NTI Audio wanted to sample the digital signal of an AES-3 audio stream and calculate the jitter contained in this signal. In the theoretical section I created a MatLab-Applet, which created a jittered AES3-signal and showed the relationship between sample frequency and the accuracy of the jitter measurement. In the practical section I connected a fast ADC to an FPGA, instantiated a RAM-Core in VHDL, sampled several ms of the signal and routed the data to the PC for evaluation.

• Finished my study in 2007
• Worked at Marian Digital Audio Electronics from 2007 to 2009. Back in Leipzig

I started working on a new type of portable recording microphone: The Yellowtec iXm. It included a SD-Card to save the audio files, a clever algorithm to avoid distortions and keep the audio signal at a constand level, two power sources and of course a superior broadcast-ready audio quality.

• Worked at THUM+MAHR for their brand Yellowtec from 2009 to 2021 in Monheim am Rhein

I continued to work on the iXm, which has become somehow my baby and I'm always happy to see it on TV. The PCBs were improved in every production run and in 2020 I worked on a spin-off, the iXm Podcaster.

The most interesting project was the Intellimix. I designed the PCB for the control unit and had the chance to research touch-technology, so I could realize the smooth touch-faders in soft- and in hardware. Also on this project I was able to awaken an old passion of mine: FPGAs and VHDL-programming. I could built a display-splitter, which took a video stream and splitted it up to the five streams to show content on the displays on the front panel.

In the Litt-Project I could research DC/DC-switchers and LED-technology.

In the x64-Project I came in touch with Audio-over-IP for the first time. Especially with the Ravenna and the LiveWire+ Protocols, but also with the Dante-Protocol. So I had to route Gigabit-Ethernet for the first time.

As a permanent side quest I was responsible for the production line tests. I set up the test-hardware and wrote the test-software. Everything was based on NIs TestStand, LabView and Python.