NEW I/O cards with outstanding preamps for Horus and Hapi / ENGLISH

hello everybody hello everybody welcome to this webinar from merging technologies so today we're gonna present you along with cloud our new generation of ad modules for horse and happy users so we're glad that we have people already online and we look forward to going through those modules with cloud so close and we can how are you guys doing as I'm currently in Geneva area and you are in the headquarters near we do nerves between Lausanne and motor so tell us how are things there we are highly we coming everybody to this women I have to say that I hope you are us in the D confinement zone right now a partial progress towards no longer being obliged to stay at home all the time that's our case with Mikhail follow me here who is the lead designer on this new agey a8 second-generation card so it's it's a great pleasure to have you with us tonight and I have to say personally that I first like to wish you something and good health as I've been training quite a bit these past weeks on remote effective video conferencing a palliative there's a little bit of that habit which is still with us so it needs some switching but cheers so if we recap query currently we our latest board force and happy was the AKD model a KD here eight so Clawd can you explain to us briefly and show us where we're going to now with this new module coming up exactly so we since about one week now shipping this latest generation a da e8 card in two models standard which supports up 290 kilohertz sampling rate and a premium version which supports that's brand-new the older card didn't support that DSD DSD 64 128 and 256 as well as DX D sampling rates up to 384 kilo Hertz so that's the additional features that this new generation boards bring to us which means essentially that in earlier days we had to support DX D and DSD we could only have 8 channels in 8 channels out in happy while we now have a solution to support 16 channels of full ultra-high resolution DX D or DSD conversion both in and out 16 channels in the happy and 48 channels in the horas equipped of course with these boards fully which is of course giving more flexibility and additional expansion to our range it took some more time for us to get there where we wanted to be already in early March because as many of you of course understand and experience yourself things have been a little bit more troublesome during this whole winter time both in procuring parts relations to our subcontractors and then finally us also no longer being in the position to work as usual on the preliminary production units versus initial plant so we're even more happy that we there yet and the initial response has been quite good while we got some orders for that you board from early December and January 1st 8 rest around the world because there were some rumors this card would come to the market soon we were happy to be able to start shipping Rainier this past two weeks and we're now at over 50 units shipped already so it's working well we have a we have found out meteor that we had a fantastic year so very very little troubles with these manufacturing run so it looks it's going to be also quite a reliable unreliable absolutely so it's shipping now it's it's available and it comes with to be clear it comes with a new four firmware we developed to support those new module that are based on a new generation of components and a new generation actually of a layout so it had to be coming with a new firmware available through the sales partner of your area and everybody can actually immediately starts to operate the card and and record as we have something that's working in terms of firmware already for for good production or testing at least yeah there's going to be some further work done on the firmware in the coming weeks I'll mention those a bit later with Ricardo but the the one which is shipping now has renewal the fundamental functionality there's a final fine-tuning that we want to do but this is relatively minor the the good news is the target design criteria we had for this design were more than met the target I had for Michael was to make a board which is both superior and spec using novel topologies of particularly big tree amplifiers that we have already rehearsed in the anoobas last year so we took advantage of that new dual game ad technology that was fine-tuned last year for enemies to deploy that as well on this new board plus of course refined D to a better deep way and line out specs than the former board definitely which had separate mission also for me reality he did it quite well which was also to allow us also to either lower pricing level for these new cards compared to the previous generation so both targets have been met the the new pricing is USD 1,800 for the standard card while the previous generation was 2100 so quite a reduction the premium of course is a bit more expensive but that's normal because not only has the premium more support for high something regen particularly for ESD but it also has improved specifications as you will see in a moment so it's pretty amazing that today what you used to need different module for happy to have 280 cards to record 16 microphone and then you had to put 16 da if you needed 16 da for DSD monitoring as to now you can buy just 2 modules of these module and have immediately 16 inputs and 16 outputs in premium mode so you can monitor directly your your your light your live recording in DSD and thinking that the same applies to horas means that in premium or s condition you will have 48 inputs and 48 outputs in DSD up to 256 in such a compact travelling clocks which is which which is actually very great I think so right now offering such a compact performance in such a small unit of volume of course so let's talk a little bit about these these marvelous texts we have with this new card maybe Ricardo you yeah give us some initial data so you wanted to start with the PowerPoint I would or no no we may be yes let's do a little bit of technical specs first and then we will listen to to the actual result exactly excellent so again two versions the standard which supports something rate up to 192 kilohertz which for other brands is of course the extreme of the of extreme for us it's just a start and the premium which supports DX D and the DSD and all the measurements we need are pretty phenomenal maybe you can show the next slide here we are the few who have already studied an abyss will recognize very similar value that even maybe a tiny bit better in the 88 compared to the an abyss because first of all we have no room in the inn that card although it has its ports eight channels of course of in and out but also the power waves are higher in the horizontal P we we use plus 15 and minus 15 volt power rails for the analog front end so it's it's of course a bit giving us better Headroom compared to an abyss where our power rails for power consumption were limited to plus and minus 12 volt values of dynamic range are exceptional let's let's not be ashamed of those values the line input offers you 139 DB typical dynamic range a waked with distortion plus noise at full scale better than 110 DB why the mic input is very near in value at 137 DB typical dynamic range it's THD plus noise figure is also exceptionally good even slightly better better than hundred eleven dB and that's on all eight channels of course so with that in mind let's again get to the next slide which explains a little bit how we reach those phenomenal specifications on the input side you can see with us here the actual block diagram of one channel with essentially the essential parts that allow us to get these type of performance for that we use to a to d converter channel trip the trip has a channel of conversion so for that board typically we use two chips of each eight channel which is a total of sixteen channels of ad comparison and combine these two by two but I'm liking the AKG HD the Perth the the the previous generation eighty cards we had instead of combining than just in parallel which gives us about 3 DB better dynamic range we use here a dual gain path topology and you see on the left side starting from the left side we have the phantom power 48 volt circuitry then analogue preamp with three main gain settings and after that we switch the signal into two different game paths each Ricky independent a to D converter each producing 32 bits entering into an FPGA these 2 times 32 bits of resolution are then combined in a pretty smart way what we call advanced selection logic after being of course fine-tuned to correspond to the same amount level into a signal that is roughly worth a true 24 bit theoretical quality a 2d conversion we then apply optionally low-cut filter as well as a digital game which can span from 0 to 60 6 dB and finally if it's DSD we have to remodulate those signals into a new DSD signal the one bit at the outcome because of course combining those two signals and applying a and local filtering can only be done in multi bit so you see the the exact main topology of that to your game path plus the analog circuitry in front that gives you actually three gain settings line make and what we call boost you can look at boost as being sort of the anti pad level setting in microphone if you have a very very strong outputting microphone recording grant you're gonna set a pad in our case the pan is 12 DB and the boost is exactly the opposite instead of diminishing the sensitivity it of maths the sensitivity of your signal by 12 DB which would perfectly match lower microphone output as those coming out of traditional ribbon microphones or low-level outputting dynamic microphones so it would mean that with this new this new module Claude we would have a gain range that is not limited to 66 DB but that would go all the way to 78 DB is that correct exactly applying the 66 DB of digital gain plus the 12 DB of boost brings you up to 78 DB which should be more than enough to cover the most extreme situation that you could face by recording at a distance a mandolin or Baroque lute in church with a very sweet sound and very low environmental noise which would be perfect in such an scenarios so we would recommend to use those signals in boost mode and you will see soon what sort of discriminating result you you still get from very low up working microphones compared to the noise level of course the thermal noise level that a microphone can produce and a microphone preamp can produce in its best form which you you'll see a bit later so it means the boost is not actually limited to ribbon mics only can be used with conventional and yeah yeah if you are in a situation where where the output of your contents a Mac is never above 0db you which is close to point seven seven five vault root mean square then of course feel free also to select boost in that the advantage of what you see here is is numerous let's switch to the next slide if you wish you can you can see it from here the first main advantage of course from from such a topology of meek preamp is the huge dynamic range need office Oh both on the Headroom side of course you have ample Headroom so this is so handy when it comes to a situation where you have to record 50 instruments in a concert hall and the the time doesn't allow you to find you all make gain settings beforehand see you can be much more relaxed because you know you're not gonna hit into into overs and click your your meat preamp while you still have ample of headroom also towards the noise level in your ad conversion so this is very useful in tricky situation where time is of essence you you have to move fast and make the best out of the recording without having hours of rehearsal in front of you of course professionals know about what to expect in the recording situations with the known microphone etc but they can all always be surprises and here you are safe even with surprises so much less rehearsal time to optimum gain settings and it has this ancillary advantage that now that all the game is essentially done in digital form there's absolutely complete removal of any clicks when switching your gains you - switching relays or equivalent of relays in electronic form in solid state form so it's a continuously smooth gain step if you change your gains so it's a bit paradoxical because it's a product where you actually no longer really need to adjust your gain too much but still if you want you have to do it eub you'll be comfortable knowing that game switching is totally inaudible it's as smooth as moving a rotary potentiometer so during a recording you could you could think that you could with security changed a tiny bit the level of your preamps again and and be confident that the recording will be perfectly clean you know what if yes any exactly at that point so even more so as we offer 0.5 DB gain steps which is of course under the the audible limit what you can hear is last but not least the fact that we have so much dynamic range in the output of our a to D converter allows us to to imagine that we'll be able to add creative add-ons like soft limiters or noise gates whatever or compressors on top of that single true again reduce a bit this phenomenal dynamic range without harming me of course the signal and this is even more so possible because on this new card not only the analog circuitry is exceptional but we we planned a lot of room for digital enhancement as well by using a state-of-the-art new generation FPGA which is offering a lot of space for additional plugins in the coming weeks and months so there will be more on that but it's too early to mention at this point time what what's coming next in terms of soft plugins on top riding on the DSP performance or the FPGA performance of what we embedded on that new cart okay let's now move to I think with discus enough input specs let's quickly briefly mention the output also the line output quality maybe before we will do some listening test comparative maybe you could show everyone yes exactly the the excel sheet which gives you an exact example of what gets measured every board that gets out of our production has an accompanying sheet which has the wrap-up of all the measurements we did on that card and I hope you can you can read it here this is typical of recent board we just tested a week ago or something like that with its serial 85 oh wait six so is the 86 void already which shows you on each of the eight channel the exact specs we we routinely measure on these cards which are quite expect exceptional let's start from the bottom figure the bottom line you see here we typically have on every channel better than 126 DB dynamic range a weighted for each channel on that board and the value of the dynamic range unweighted is about also a typical 124 DB which is which is a pretty good number and you may not know it but I'll disclose also at this very moment that those values are actually better than the manufacturers data sheet specs by at least 1 and a 1/2 DB so it shows that this surrounding analog circuitry has been very well taken care of that's the dynamic range on the THD + n figure that's the other line which you see in green why is it in green because that shows you that the products are all tested for are they ok to be labeled as premium or standard and earlier I explained that the the standard boards and the premium boards have different features it's a three-way mainly but there's also a selection done on those who have the best specs are also selected for being labeled premium and here you see that if there are above the threshold of 115 DB THD person radio they are turning to green as they are all about above 116 or even hundred seventeen on each channel for THD percent keep in mind that the analogue precision equipment which we are using which is a fine equipment has its own limitation and its limitations about 118 DB so just 1 DB above those measures so we can imagine that those measures those measured given by audio precision which is limited at 1 DP of those values so in an ideal case we would probably be able to sport hundred 20 DB here of THD percent so it's it's almost says that at full scale up to full scale we have negligible THD of those line outputs if you scroll up with a lot of quality control on each model and the users that purchase the card gets a copy of this file correct quote every user should unless it gets lost in the shipment but no users should get those very confirmed numbers when he received his board and as you can see the same happens for the make input we measure everything we measure the mick noise we measure the equivalent input noise you see here that it could be better than 127 - hundred twenty-seven dB you hear for it so you see it's it's above 128 DB you on each Channel yeah one one one line here yes exactly it's the one above I as a matter fact yes here yeah so this is this is good numbers the distortion also it's all about 110 above which is which is showing that there is a good consistency as well on these boards as far as we can tell so far and if you scroll it even further up you will see we do the same thing on the line input as well so all the data is in there crosstalk measures are exceptional as well at 20 years we have how about 261 [Music] maybe so quickly there's no crosstalk essentially at 1 kilo Hertz we have cross dogs better than 130 DB typically 135 inter channel crosstalk so we we kind of know starting to learn our stuff with with this next generation of board's common mode rejection right is a rejection rate is also a good number with with typical 80 to 90 DB of rejection rate well above our target limit of 60 good I think enough said numbers I don't want to to to stretch those those technical specs too much they're important of course but the most important is of course what our users are going to be able to enjoy in terms of recording that the transparency of the recordings they will do with that new cart as of yesterday we managed to put online on the product I will just show so maybe everyone where to get there because we want you actually now to stop looking at us after that and go yourself there there's also a link you can click from the live feed chat let us know if you have any difficulty reaching that place so we on our site under merging comm interface overview you will be able to to see different sample to hear different samples recorded where you see the where we compare different generation of burgeoning modules but also we look at the competition so if once we are here if you scroll bit down in the page we bring you to this judge yourself section for yourself section where Claude you will you will quickly wrap up what do we get here what are the three different samples that we can listen to yeah so you see here on that page three typical example recordings with it with actual equipment on the left side you will be able to listen to the noise floor plus a very low level one kilohertz sine signal which you can see on an FFT as well here at minus hundred 10 DB with respect to full scale as you can see with our dual game path technology the noise floor one is still way below this - hundred then DB signal it is here you can see it's in the range of minus 160 to minus 165 dbfs as energy or spread over the frequency this is what Ricardo is showing you here is what we get with this new drug game path technology that we deploy in a da-a-ate second generation and enemies while yes if you look in the middle you have our up to now trader a 2d which is showing the same - hundred 10 DB full-scale sign and the noise floor is a little bit higher at minus hundred fifty-five which is already very good but it's about seven to eight DB higher than our latest generation technology and then finally if you scroll to the right you can see the an example of a third party mid-range product yes it's not exactly the same price range as a da-a-ate it's a it's a third party product which is in the five hundred two thousand dollar price range but where you see a completely different noise level essentially at least 15 DB higher but the more interesting thing now for you is to try it out on your own headphone or speakers please do as Ricardo is going to do they gotta press on the play ata 8v - yes you're not gonna hear that because we were unable to mix that for you but please feel free to try that for yourself at home and listen to this signal surrounded by it's very very low amount of noise and once you've done that you can listen to the noise of the akd ad don't go there yet ricardo sorry let the guys try to play for themselves a bit the the other ones the middle one a KD ad play that compared and finally try it's pretty revealing demetria yeah it's pretty revealing you don't need the very expensive headset to - already here no do you need a pretty golden here type of auditory system exactly we're not talking peanuts here this is massive this is the I was almost ashamed when we got to make those examples that's one thing you can now as you as Ricardo chose this is using the noise floor with low level sign examples if you hit the other button noise floor orally you have exactly the same as before but just the noise floor without the one killers so you can really discriminate the noise itself of a mid period an ad converter in different generation of technology and what our come some of our competitors do have a listen try it out and we'll be back with you in twenty second time to have a bit of white wine from happy QA here while you enjoy your listening if you want to give some comments on on the track feel free I'd love to hear from you right now what what that experience inspires you so while doing this I will quickly resume that as explained before we have this new firmware coming with a DAAP to the new generation of a da s and a P and that new firmware brings in also a new remote control for the the boost parameter of the pad so the the reverse pad that boosts 12 DB the the game so I propose that as in a few seconds I will show you what does that mean in remote in a remote control as I have connected here the happy so I think we will go ahead yes so I have a happy here that is fitted with actually the the the new a da so let me just open here so you can see the first generation on the on the on the left from one to eight is the eight which was limited to a standard model and now we have the new a DA a s and P this is a premium but I put it in the sampling rate where we see both modules next to each others so as you can see this is the new parameter we have which is actually not the pad but it's the boost that Claude mentioned when we were looking at the genetic of the the new dual 32-bit preamp circuitry here so quick word cloud may be on the boost yes so this is like that but just the opposite to explain it just in a simple fashion it is the same thing more or less as applying 12 DB of gain but those 12 DB of gain will be applied in the front-end analog circuitry and not in digital form so you gain from a lower equivalent input noise when you do that so typically what we recommend to do and that will come in the next iteration of the firmware is when the slider moves up and down and you I make mode not boost it will turn up Orange starting at plus 12 dB and as you move up at plus 24 DB will probably turn highlighted red just to remind the user that they might be better off switching the boost on for optimal performance and what they do so also what will change from this initial firmware is that you'll initially see this fader jumped by 12 DB upwards so in boost mode this fader range will actually not be from 0 to plus 66 it will indicate from plus 12 to plus 78 which is more corresponding to the actual reality of the game we apply to the circuitry I think that's easy to understand all the rest is of course similar as the previous generation that that's the major new human interface difference that appears we could have done doll that automatically but I have to confess that we didn't want to take the risk of automatically switching between boosts and not boost which produces a little click unlike of course all the game settings in the means of recording it will be nice to have this little click when engaging a boost the same sort of click you have also engaging a pad it's not totally click less it makes a little bit of artifact locally at that point in time and we didn't want our users to experience that we prefer to let them the responsibility control whenever it's good for them to turn boost on a pad on or not so this new this is pretty much the new parameter we have on this new board and it's also this it's also available locally on the horse on the Auris display and also on the happy display where you have a new new parameter to select the booster pad or none but I must say we have not implemented this parameter in remote control in the only term excite as of now also because it's not in the specification of the MIDI puree remote that we are hugely based on so it means that the Pro Tools or third-party as much as ours digital audio workstation will have to for now use the remote control here to access this parameter here so we'll see four pair mix if we could do or something for pure mix it's more harder than fact that it's not the it's not available and like other competitors have parameters like air or something like that well we have the boost here so probably you are familiar some of you to to the fact that you don't have always have all the controls on third-party digital audio workstation on the preamps so I think that resumes pretty much this page here so I think I will join your back load yes please we can you also have a little bit of local Swiss white wine next to you or I with the audience of course I think we've done pretty well we plan for 45 minutes we have maybe a little bit of time left for questions if if you have any any questions I see a few live feeds feedback saying that they joined the noise samples excellent so if they enjoy the noise I'm sure they're gonna even more enjoy the music and we hope to one of these next days to be able also to add to those examples some with real music recorded in a church or in a chapel whatever with the ribbon mic with one of our great recording customers but as you all understand it was impossible to do the these sort of do recordings right now in coronavirus times it's just too complex to to to get the approval and organize something like that right now you know better than us because you aren't the same than than we are probably by not being able to enjoy a normal life full of life music particularly record of one more thing I wanted also wanted not to forget to tell is if you guys plan to record in DSD with that card my own recommendation is switch to DSD 256 we've done a few tests here and measurements etc and it's worth the deals going to DSD 256 DSD 64th of course pint is the other 28 that it'll be better but de 256 is really the key to to the best of of those samung rates and the cost of storage on the hard drive today is modest enough that you don't need to really take care too much about the increased storage space that gives D 256 will take compared to Disney hundred 28 and fifty 64 so please make sure that you don't hesitate a second and do it in DSD 256 um unless the producer tells you he doesn't want it that's a different topic of course excellent well thank you very much for this presentation somebody wants to say hello quickly here so me so he likes to come and visit yeah yeah he likes to jump around here it's warm and basically it's a bit it goes with merging [Laughter] spending you will feel lonely tired that they were y'all back yet but it's a pleasure to be here we still here and working but healthy before all to all of you do I see a question here would to a DAT first pause a happy for example to run at hotter temperature than earlier aisle cards that's a good question either it will not silly significantly right temperature boxes of Appeal ORS but the fact is we use phantom power which is a little bit different than the other cuts but still site to get the count as no problem Michael and I don't have the exact power consumption numbers in my brain but as far as I remember we we don't use more power than the former a da-a-ate card no on top of that we we using operational amplifiers which we have limited quite some current the 80 and da chips were using are also quite well behaved no no it's a regret all that increased performance at no increasing heat generated good question thanks so far it's been it's been running pretty warm here for me beak and I mean not not the board but I I had the happy fitted in Iraq and I did not leave the space unit Iraq empty above and below to make sure I squeeze the heat as much as possible on my horse and happy and things have been going very fine and smooth for for that so we're testing in various condition if we do and and remotely also so we're sure would love to have the feedback of the users once you get the card in hand yes Ricardo thank you for conducting this this aperitif and informational webinar in such a timely and professional manner thank you very much thank you to all of you who attended oh there's a few more questions showing up pepper yes a very good one is this card the first touch to beat ad than earlier one yes it is true I forgot to mention that this ad a8p is a fully 32-bit designed both in and out right now it has to be said that the rest of our architecture is not yet fully 32-bit transparent particularly not Ravenna and a year 67 but that's in the works it is our aim with in the coming month to slowly make sure we have a full transference path of 32-bit word land because it's worth once your ad converter is almost 24-bit 23 and a half it's worth making sure you have a bit more Headroom in the digital domain to convey those 24 bits without truncating at any point in time so yes it's our way to create a fully 32-bit transparent path not only within the card but also going over the network to a digital audio workstation being recorded in 32 bits droid mixed and then reproduced again in 32 bit so that's coming along we started with the Adobe's where you already have a full 32-bit transparent mix engine on top of being a to D up to D to a 32-bit the same the same mission is in the works for horace and happy with this being the new and first card to offer a full 32-bit conversion yes so that's a great future for the happy still the happy users today could benefit from still great development on their devices horace and happy let me also respond to the other question from derek here does this new card also replace the current da 8 p card not exactly not really it offers specs which are very close to our latest generation dat card but of course reasons of space and form factor we are not using exactly the same D to a converter chip that we use in the DHAP when you use really the top of range ESS 9000 28 Pro here we're using the 9 o 26 Pro we're using it with specs that are almost as good as the specs given for the 928 by its manufacturer but it's it's just it's near but it's almost as good I'd like to say I'm not exactly let's be honest other than that yes it's very close to the 8p cards and in many cases I would say it will replace very well at the AP card for reasons of space if you need to have the input channels as well in your configuration absolutely and once we have the 32 bit panel yes don't I think all of you guys you attended thank you all for staying with us on this Friday afternoon just before we can I wish you a very good weekend as well and see you next webinar see you naked special thanks to Nicolette the technical yes the technique that helped set up this and Maurice alone so nice weekend to all of you and we we talk to Cheers changes sit here

Channel: MergingTechnologies

Views: 2,592

Keywords: AES67, RAVENNA, ST2110, pyramix, pyramix for mastering, daw, mastering, audio mastering

Id: IMkUcWr2-cg

Length: 56min 2sec (3362 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020