UK - XTA is a UK manufacturer with as good a reputation for its signal processing and dynamics kit as any manufacturer out there. Formed by three ex-Klark Teknik R&D engineers in 1992, the company has grown from the humble origins of Andrew Grayland's back bedroom (although I'm sure it was a very nice room) to a multi-million pound venture, headquartered in the more businesslike environment of its current home in Stourport-on-Severn.
Now in its 13th year, the company has behind it a string of highly successful products - among them the industry-standard DP224 and DP226 loudspeaker processors, the SiDD intelligent dynamics package and the Series 2 dynamics. Its success has come partly from a market-led approach to product design; Grayland and co-founder John Austin, along with Phil Key who joined the company back in 1992, are all still hands-on as sound engineers, regularly mixing live bands and keeping in touch with the reality of live sound. This grass-roots involvement has kept the team on track with identifying and meeting the needs of engineers, time after time. Add to that a firm commitment to quality and reliability which runs throughout the company's manufacturing processes, and you have a powerful formula.
Recent developments include the release earlier this year of the Wireless 'Walkabout' kit which enables control of the company's Audiocore control software over WiFi. We witnessed this in operation when XTA's Guy Lewis took us to Birmingham's Medicine Bar nightclub, where it was being used to control a Funktion One rig.This month, at the Frankfurt ProLight&Sound exhibition, the latest introduction is receiving its European debut - the DP428. The next generation of the hugely successful 224 and 226 processors, the 428 not only surpasses the number of Ins and Outs of the previous models (4 inputs, 8 outputs, as its name suggests), it also surpasses them in terms of features, and of sound quality. The latter in particular has been a hard nut to crack.
The DP428 uses high-performance 24-bit converters on the inputs and outputs, running at 96kHz to give a bandwidth of over 30kHz and a dynamic range in excess of 114dB. Any input can be routed to any output, yet it retains the same intuitive ease of use as the 226 - a fundamental principle in XTA product design. Andrew Grayland explains the background to the 428's development: "The 224 and 226 and SiDD were based on a particular DSP processor, which is a fantastic one - very precise, that's why we chose it originally - but the down side is it wouldn't allow free assignability. There are six chips in there and the signal has to go, hardware-wise, in this path through the chips. The other thing is, going to 96kHz, you need twice as much DSP processing. So we had to look for a new processor, and the Sharc was the obvious one because it's very powerful and very accurate. What the Sharc has enabled us to do is have more filters in there, and it's also allowed us free assignability - any input to any output."
"When you develop a new platform like that there's a lot of learning involved. You've got to work out the algorithm and the precision of the maths; once we've done that, and we have now done it, hopefully we can spin off other products from that same platform much quicker than we could before."
The unit also included new A-D and D-A converters, and more, as Grayland explains. "The other thing we've done is include a whole new family of filters in there - so first and second order all-pass networks, phase adjustments, bypass, notch - we've developed this whole array of filters which we've now got to apply," here he means in terms of educating the users - something that he and the rest of the team are often found doing at Glastonbury, for example, where they have a valuable opportunity to support and train engineers in the live env
