New Merging Technologies Card Adds Power to Pyramix DAW

At NAB2007, Switzerland-based Merging Technologies, makers of the Pyramix Digital Audio Workstation, will demonstrate the sixth generation of the Mykerinos PCI-format DSP card, at least one of which lies at the heart of all non-native Pyramix systems.

The MYK-X series cards, together with a range of associated I/O daughter cards, take Pyramix's capabilities to a new level. The MYK-X30 takes advantage of recent improvements in Philips' Tri Media processor technology to deliver 1.2 GFlops of peak processing power available and a memory bandwidth of 1,600 Mbps. It's well suited to supplying the DSP power required to drive the multichannel recording and real-time mixing, panning and processing operations in typical Pyramix systems, yet it's a half-length PCI Express card. Even with one of its associated optional I/O daughter cards attached, it only takes up one PCIe slot in the host PC.

One single MYK-X30 card permits Pyramix systems to mix 48 channels and all their strip tools plug-ins simultaneously to stereo and surround busses--a performance increase of more than 25 percent on the previous-generation Mykerinos card. As with the older cards, the new card can be daisy-chained to provide more processing power.

The X30 is backward compatible with previous Mykerinos cards and I/O daughter cards, but Merging has already begun updating its range of I/O cards at the same time. The existing SDIF daughter card has undergone a firmware upgrade to expand its range of possible applications: both high-resolution PCM and DSD-format audio are now fully supported, as is the ability to input audio and metadata from Sony's vintage PCM1630 CD Mastering recorders.

Merging Technologies will be in booth SL4014.