At this years AES convention, Harrison unveiled a handful of new products on the floor, including the SuperMon surround monitor system, TDM router, analog and digital converters, and DSP Plug-in tools.
Interestingly, most of these offerings will be available as stand alone products that could also integrate into Harrisonss line of analog, digital, and film consoles.
SuperMon is the name of a new series of monitoring devices designed to be modular and scalable. It is intended to solve a variety of problems for post, film, and music studios. Looking at the Film system for example, one sees such features as 112 AES inputs, 56 AES outputs, 32 PEC/Direct Virtual switches, and a 48 x 8 Summing Matrix with level mute and solo on all inputs, as well as complete recall of all settings.
Optional features include an 8 x 8 digital monitor matrix, 96 kHz sample rate, eight input/output crossover channels, and additional MADI and AES I/O.
We also have an analog variant of the SuperMon that consists of a 64 x 8 and an 8 x 8 x 3 that occupies a 3 RU space and has a similar GUI to the film version, notes Harrisons marketing manager Mark Dooley. Were excited to provide audio solutions that, prior to now, were only available with very expensive large-format consoles.
Working alone or as part of the SuperMon platform is the new digital signal conversion system, originally developed to interface with Harrisons digital engine.
Referred to as Carriers the units that convert the signal they are housed in 3 RU cages that can mount in standard racks. Available carrier types include analog input, analog output, AES in, and AES out. AES Carriers support 28 stereo pairs interfaced on four, 25-pin D connectors. Analog cards support 56 channels across seven 25-pin D connectors, with each Carrier also supporting one MADI signal stream. There is also no inherent limit on the number of converters per system due to its modular nature.
Harrison also showed a new series of DSP plug-ins that is currently slated to work with the latest generation of Harrison consoles. Referred to as the Toys, they include a buss limiter, leveled EQ, crossover EQ, telephone filter (and other filters), a de-esser, and a de-noiser. They also have one of the most visually attractive GUI interfaces that Ive seen lately. Each Toys package has a dedicated processing module and a suite of software plug-ins that sell separately. Up to eight Toys can run simultaneously in a single module, in any signal chain order. Multiple modules can be added to Harrisonss DSP core as more of the plug-ins become available.
Last but not least is the Time Domain Multiplexing (TDM) router. The capabilities of one of these fully loaded routers are massive, routing 2240 x 2240 signals. Up to three loaded routers can be combined, creating a 6720 x 6720 routing network. Thats a lot of signal!
Dooley provided an example of the routers capabilities: The Second Baptist Church in Houston needed a cost-effective means to allocate and route audio sources between the FOH console and the console in the media center, he explains. The Harrison TDM router enabled the routing and control of all signals throughout the large facility from a central interface, with multiple satellite points of control. Now they can partition not only the audio sources to the consoles, but the allocation of DSP processing and the final outputs as well, i.e., 96 channels FOH or 96 channels media console for services. When there is no church service, all 192 channels of DSP can be used for postproduction in their media center. This is but one of a myriad of possibilities addressed by our stand-alone systems.
For more information, visit www.glw.com.
