The present invention relates to minimizing a leakage current in a floating island portion formed in a thin film transistor. At a first time and in response to a first time reference, a first rendezvous signal is sent from a first to a second of the plurality of main processors. Downstream and upstream rates may be aggregated evenly or unevenly over each twisted-pair wire in the copper cabling. As many of the methods are computer-implemented, the invention additionally provides digital systems and software for performing these methods. Other embodiments are also described and claimed. The audio encoder utilizes the threshold templates to operate a compression algorithm, obviating the need to implement a psycho-acoustic model to generate a distortion threshold for each compression operation.