However, the industry's requirements move ahead at a pace and sound designers were creating ever more realistic soundscapes. Immersive sound is becoming part of cinema and home audio but this has now spread to live events, product launches and even museums. The need to accurately place mono, stereo or multichannel sounds in a given space became paramount.
Merging's creative team looked at solutions that were commercially available and found that none of them properly addressed the requirements for ease of operation and realistic sound placement. Creating something new and different was clearly the only way to enhance Ovation and Pyramix (the DAW that is incorporated into the Ovation suite).
The result of this work will be on display at ISE where an impressive array of 12 Tannoy Di6 Dual Concentric loudspeakers, driven by Lab.gruppen IPD Series amplifiers, will demonstrate how customised virtual rooms can be created quickly and easily.
Tannoy's Dual Concentric driver design - which places the tweeter behind the centre of the medium or bass driver - allows for a much truer, more coherent sound source, perfect for this kind of application, while the Lab.gruppen IPD amplifiers offer a latest-generation DSP engine equipped with up to a total of 40 real-time, multi-slope parametric EQs along with adjustable gain, input and output delay, and both high- and low-pass filters adjustable to any frequency.
The realism of the soundscape will be further enhanced by using a TC Electronic System 6000 running the new Reverb 8 algorithm; the first reverb tailored for multidimensional 3D sound. Ovation will also be driving a lighting array and be linked to a Dataton Watchpax media player to show the power and flexibility of Ovation in any presentation scenario.
Merging's Networked Audio Interfaces, Horus and Hapi have also found a place in many installations and are "the perfect partners in any complex design". Easy interconnection, exceptional sound quality and the simple set up and routing show the practical advantages of RAVENNA/AES67 networking. The arrival of the new combination ADA8 board, offering 8 mic/line inputs and 8 analog outputs on the same card significantly increases the capacity of both these products, with Horus able to handle 48 in and 48 out and Hapi 16 x 16 or 8 x 8 plus MADI.
Merging's product manager, Johan Wadsten will be on stage in the ISE Commercial Theatre to present Museums - An aural as well as visual experience. This intriguing session will use the recent installations at La Grande Galerie de l' Evolution in Paris and the Imperial War Museum to illustrate why Ovation is as essential in this type of installation as it is in a more dynamic live event.
(Jim Evans)
