RTW Celebrates 10 Years Of Seeing Surround Sound A Whole New Way

RTW has announced the 10th anniversary of its introduction of SurroundMonitor, which in 1999 enabled audio professionals to see sound in a whole new way.
SurroundMonitor was the first dedicated visual surround monitor on the market to enhance display beyond simple, multichannel meters. Indeed, SurroundMonitor introduced a radical innovation - vector-based display - thus paving the way for RTW's Surround Sound Analyser and the easily understood house-shaped display that today is familiar all over the world.
In the late 1990s, RTW engineers, recognising that traditional techniques were inadequate for showing the complex parameters and interplay of multichannel audio, set out to devise a better solution. The result was SurroundMonitor, which soon became known as the "spider" because of the configuration in which it displayed the five main channels of a 5.1 signal.
The beginning of RTW's dedicated, practice-based refinement of visual surround-audio monitoring was marked by the advent of SurroundMonitor 10800, noteworthy for its two independent upright TFT displays.
Finally, in 2000, RTW developed its Surround Sound Analyser - also based on the vector presentation. Introduced in the SurroundMonitor 10800X in 2001, Surround Sound Analyser remains today an integral part of all surround-enabled visualisation systems by RTW and has been licensed to Tektronix for their Waveform Monitor and AMM-768. As a result, it is the preferred surround-monitoring tool for many audio professionals all over the world.
Andreas Tweitman, RTW Managing Director, said: "What began as a spider has morphed into a house. But the fundamental innovation - seeing sound in terms of easy to understand vectors instead of traditional, and limited meters - remains the same. Ten years ago, RTW engineers were responsible for this great leap forward in sound monitoring, Today they remain committed to continual innovation and improvement in the technology."
(KMcA/BMcC)