With its consoles being used by high-profile TV shows including “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Conan,” as well as by independent broadcasters such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Studer is coming to NAB with a renewed focus on the broadcast market, and a few new products as well.
The company has hired a new sales director for the United States, Rob Lewis, who will be based at parent company Harman’s Northridge, CA, offices, and will institute a more personalized sale approach. Harman is hoping that the Studer reputation for quality will find success with broadcasters needing audio mixing and sweetening for live and studio productions.
Along with a number of new models to expand the Vista product line, Studer will have its Vista 5, 8 and 9 consoles on display. The latest model features the company’s Vistonics TFT touch-screen interface that shows 10 channel strips, with rotary encoders and switches mounted directly onto the screen.
During a live production, a FaderGlow feature lights up select faders on the console, in one of eight assignable colors, to give operators a quick and easy way to find desired channel groups, dramatically increasing reaction time and reducing the stress of mixing in an environment where there is no second chance.
The Vista 9 also features new metering on signal status. The channel meters are able to show mono, right through to 7.1-channel signals, in the upper section of the screen, while the lower portion can show bus assignment or, for surround channels, an image of the surround composite, providing a clear and easily understandable display of the surround signal.
In addition, a history mode records event, such as overloads in the audio path of each channel, and highlights them in red on the channel waveform. The operator can then review which channel had such an event up to 30 seconds after the event has occurred. All stereo inputs and stereo masters have a correlation meter bar above the bar graph display, and the control bay meter section can be configured to show any choice of output busses and input channels and displays up to 40 meters at the time.
The new Vista 9 also gives operators the freedom to place input, as well as master channels, anywhere across the surface, allowing complete customization.
The company also offers redundancy in the form of dual PSUs as well as a dual control system, to prevent against loss of control over the mix, while a redundant network system keeps up the vital communication to the DSP core.
