John Gatski is the Publisher & Executive Editor of Pro Audio Review.
Like last year, the coexistence of analog with digital showed no sign of waning at the recent 2007 AES show in New York. AES has been the setting for the PAR Excellence Awards since 1996, and Pro Audio Review’s judges again used their expertise as working engineers and editors to seek out the significant new products and product trends on the convention floor.
ALL ANALOG — YOU BET
Judging from the 2007 PAR Excellence Award winner list, analog continues to be a source of new products for manufacturers who make gear for the pro audio market. Pure analog mixer products that were picked this year included John Oram’s low-cost, highly-featured Trident 8T eight-channel eight-buss, and API’s 1608, a small-format $50,000 board designed with API’s sonic signature for premium production work.
On the rack-mount analog gear front, the selections included the A-Designs HM2EQ tube EQ and Millennia Media’s remote-controlled version of its acclaimed HV-3 microphone preamp. For live use, APB-Dynasonics took its transparent analog audio signal path from its Spectra-T and put it into the rack-mount “ProRack” mixer line.
On the digital front, there were numerous DAW software upgrades, resulting in PAR Excellence Awards for Steinberg’s Nuendo 4 and Apple’s new Logic Studio 8. Venerable processing company Waves netted an award for its GTR3 guitar processor software, a digital emulation bundle of classic analog guitar amp/stomp tones.
Despite the prevailing trend to digitally process effects via software, Lexicon won an award for its new reverb hardware processor, the PCM96.
DIGITAL MIXER CHOICES
Digital mixers and control surfaces, of course, are always in abundance at AES, and this year’s winners included the AMS Neve Genesys digitally controlled production console and Fairlight’s all-digital Xynergi (using the powerful Crystal Core CC-1 processing engine). Studer received an award for smartly adapting its Vista digital console for live use with the new Vista 5-SR.
Digital converters was the biggest winning category this year with awards going to Benchmark Media for its USB 1-interfaced ADC1 and DAC1, Lavry Engineering for the AD10 A/D with tube and transformer emulation modes, the portable Apogee Duet mic-pre and converter interface, Prism Sound’s premium-featured Orpheus FireWire interface, Antelope Audio’s Isochrone OCX Master Clock and the PCIe card version of the popular Lynx AES 16.
SONY’S LOW-COST PORTABLE
One of my favorite categories, portable field recorders, was not as crowded with new products as last year, but the sole winner was a very hot product. The $599 Sony PCM-D50 is a 24-bit/96-kHz portable with built-in microphones, hard drive and memory stick capability. It’s the little, low-cost brother to the PCM-D1, which was an award winner in 2005, and is $1,500 less money while maintaining good performance from the down-priced mics and preamp.
Last but not least, I will mention the TC Electronic Studio Konnect 48, an all-in-one, analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog multi-channel computer interface that has numerous digital input and output options and includes software for total computer audio integration. The product was mysteriously low-key in its display on the AES show floor, but we found the rack-mount marvel at a TC press dinner and were so impressed it had to be nominated for the PAR Excellence — definitely one for my rack.
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