As NAB Show New York prepares to return to the Javits Center after several years away due to COVID-19, TV Tech caught up with Phil Owens, senior sales engineer at Wheatstone Corp. Attendees at the show can find Wheatstone in booth 1518 with the company’s latest innovations.

TV Tech: What are you most looking forward to at NAB Show New York?

Phil Owens: As a regional East Coast show, NAB Show New York focuses on several very big markets (New York City, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston) and it’s always a pleasure to personally connect with our clients and friends from these cities.

TVT: What will be Wheatstone's most important product news?

Owens: Our new Layers Software Suite, which runs on enterprise IP servers and includes full-function virtual radio and television consoles, as well as glass user interfaces for backend mixing, audio processing and streaming into a transmitter or CDN provider.

One server can host multiple broadcast instances, replacing dedicated hardware for many studios and locations—specifically audio mixing consoles, standalone audio processors and streaming appliances.

To learn more about the Layers Software Suite, visit the company’s website.

If you’re new to AoIP topologies, you have probably heard it’s best to set up a central core stack of switches in the TOC with edge switches at each studio or group of studios. There are two good reasons to do this: 

1. Should a studio lose connectivity with the central stack for any reason—fire in the TOC, flood, power outage—individual studios can continue to operate independently via their local switches.

Cisco has a topology called Stackwise, where the back planes of multiple switches in a TOC, for example, can be joined at very high bandwidth (somewhere on the order of 160 gigabits-per-second links) in a daisy chain configuration, as shown above. If any one of the switches should drop out of the stack, the other stack members can still communicate with each other. 

2. All local I/O is handled by the edge switches, which provides a more efficient networking and traffic control by cutting down the number of “home runs” from the studio to the central core stack.

Shown above are smaller, 12-port edge switches that handle the local I/O for the studio and have a trunk connection back to the central stack. For additional redundancy, you can take a baseband connection out of one of the local I/O nodes (or BLADEs, in the case of Wheatstone) in the studio and run it into the rack room. This gives you a baseband audio connection directly from the studio to the TOC in case you need to quickly patch programming into the RF chain. 

As a sales engineer for Wheatstone, Phil Owens has a working knowledge of AoIP topologies and best practices for designing an effective IP audio networked studio.

TV TECHNOLOGY:What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2019 NAB Show?

PHIL OWENS: The move to IP is happening, but we realize that the transition may be gradual for some stations. It will be important to offer systems that incorporate the newest IP-related requirements while also supporting the embedded architecture in current use. Not everyone will be able to just flip that switch.

TVT:What will be your most important product news?

OWENS: Wheatstone will be showing an enhanced version of the IP-64 TV board. It has enhanced graphics, more context sensitive touch screens and a more flexible Automixer. Layer management has also been improved.

We’ve been able to leverage our development work on the IP-64 to create a new TV board, the Strata 32. Like the IP-64, it’s fully IP-based and AES67-ready. It uses many of the same touchscreen functions as the IP-64 and has 32 physical input faders with two control layers, providing 64 mix channels, all in a 40-inch wide footprint. We’re able to use the Gibraltar IP Mix Engine to produce 16 aux busses, 16 mix minus busses, eight sub masters, stereo and 5.1 master outputs, all at a very attractive price point.

We’re also introducing a new Stagebox for IP-connected I/O with 32 mic/line in, 16 line out and eight-by-eight AES in a 4RU enclosure.

Finally, we’ve “virtualized” our Dimension 3 console to run on a touchscreen app for stations that require high channel counts but no physical console, for automated newsroom operations.

TVT:How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?

OWENS: Wheatstone is addressing the changes we see in the market—the move to IP, the need for higher functions/lower cost and the need for powerful virtual mixing.

TVT:What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?

OWENS: We all work better with deadlines! Every year the NAB Show drives product development at Wheatstone. We take all the feedback from our customers both at the show and over the year to help us create and display great new gear in Vegas! Plus, we enjoy seeing our friends and making new ones!