Infinity And Beyond...

Swiss-based Studer is one of the world's leading companies dealing in professional audio. Its product range includes equipment and systems for TV/radio broadcast, recording and production studios, or 19" components for system applications.

At this year's IBC, HARMAN's Studer upgraded its Infinity Series of digital consoles with the Studer Vista V, a new 52-fader Vista V based on the same Quad Star technology as its predecessor the Vista X.
BFV caught up with Roger Heiniger and Ingo Hahn, Product Managers at Studer Professional Audio.

BFV: IBC2014 saw the release of the new 'Vista V' – the latest in the company's Infinity line. Was this a big release for the show? What was the attention like on the stand?

RH: The release of the Vista V caught a lot of attention during the show. Coming up with this product was a very important step in extending our Vista mixer line from the flagship Vista X towards more compact enclosures like our very successful Vista 5, since the Vista Infinity Series mixers are equipped with the highest level of redundancy concepts, like Dual Cores with seamless switching between them without the loss of any sample and Quad Star desk redundancy, containing four CPU boards and decentralised redundancy switching of the surface control.

What does it add to the Infinity line?

Studer Vista desks come with the most intuitive user interface currently available on the market. All the advantages of the Vistonics interface together, with the power of the Infinity Core, provide the user with the best tools to handle this high channel count. Currently only Vista consoles are running with Infinity Cores, to comply with the market requirements, offering over 5000 Input- and Output channels and the power to process over 800 audio channels.
I think it's obvious that also other Studer products as well as our Harman mixer-group sister Soundcraft will profit from this outstanding new Core technology very soon.

I understand the Infinity Core won the Best Of Show Award. Was this a surprise to the team? Can you tell us about the recent updates to the range?

We are very proud to have received the recognition of the Best Of Show Award which recognises Studer's prominent role in driving innovation and excellence in our sector. I'm absolutely convinced that the x86 based Infinity Core is the future of modern digital signal processing technology for professional audio mixers and Studer is the first professional mixer manufacturer launching a large format mixer with x86 based Core technology in a single unit.
It's absolutely astonishing what potential we have with our new platform and its processing power is growing exponential according to Moore's law. Currently we can calculate more than 800 mono equivalent processing channels (including full dynamics and our standard parametric equaliser). Integration of new features like processing plug-ins is much quicker and less error prone than with any other development platform like DSPs and FPGAs.
The same is also valid if we're looking towards handling and processing video streams. There is a great variety of development tools available for x86 platforms and they are all handled with standard C++ code, which gives us great project flexibility because all of our top engineers now 'speak' this same programming language.

IP seemed to be a bigger deal at this year's show than 4K. Would you agree? Is IP the way forward for the industry?

IH: Yes indeed, IP becomes an important topic as a transfer platform for the broadcast industry. It will be an important driver method for the industry but is dependent on the level of standardisation.
Currently there are issues (like possible patent infringements, Layer2 vs. Layer3, stream announcements and discovery not being part of standards), which destablise the market and prevent faster distribution of the AoIP technology in our application field. We see some parallels to the situation with the introduction of MXF as THE new interoperability format for the broadcast video industry. After the MXF standard was agreed on, it took several years before the workflows and systems were seamlessly integrated.

Of course Studer played its part in this respect with the release of the AES67 integration. How does this facilitate Audio over IP?

IH: Generally across the Harman Professional product lines, we are "network agnostic", as such, Studer is embracing an open philosophy regarding AoIP. We think within the near future there will be a change to distributed, networked infrastructures and backends. But there still might be different systems based on different AoIP technologies. A Standard like AES67 is the right approach to ensure interoperability but from our point of view, there are still some open questions that need to be covered, for example discovery mechanisms or stream announcements. Besides audio transfer over networks – a challenge will be the installation of a stable and managed audio network to benefit from this new standard.
AES67 fits very well in Studer's open philosophy leveraging standard technologies, like we are doing with Infinity Core and the AES67 interface. Very interesting discussions at IBC with our customers and partners gave us a good feedback with respect to this approach and will help developing our business.

Once IBC is over, attention inevitably turns to NAB the following April. What will be the company's drive in the run-up to that show? Should we expect any further big announcements over the next two quarters?

RH: The Infinity Core opens up a new dimension of possibilities; you can imagine that our product roadmaps are full of new ideas for all kinds of innovative features and having unrestricted access to HARMAN's huge stable of world-leading audio processing and effects algorithms enables us to be as creative as possible. One doesn’t have to think too hard to imagine that many of these well acknowledged by sound engineers all around the world, could find their way into exciting new Studer products for next year!

The article is also available to read in BFV online.

(IT/JP)