‘A’ adds ‘V’ at ISE

Pic – Hot product at ISE – Dante AV

What better place than at the world’s largest AV show for ‘A’ to finally find its ‘V’? The first day of the Amsterdam mega tech-fest saw two titans of the AoIP world, Audinate and QSC, officially launch products that add video-over-IP to their market leading networked solutions.

Audinate kicked off with Dante AV – a new OEM board and product development suite that lets manufacturers easily add video transport to their audio solutions, or vice versa. End-users and system admins already familiar with Dante will be completely at home with the way Dante AV handles video signal in Dante Controller – it’s all exactly the same matrix patching we all know, just with video channels labelled as such. The Dante AV board carries one video signal and 8 channels of audio, allowing for all sorts of embedding and de-embedding flexibility.

Josh Rush

Audinate’s Vice President of Marketing and Product Management Josh Rush explained that customers have been asking for video to be added to the Dante suite for years, and the company even demonstrated its capability to do this at least seven years ago. Without naming names, he assured us that we can expect a raft of new Dante AV product announcements from prominent audio and video manufacturers by the end of 2019.

QSC NV-32-H

Meanwhile, QSC’s Q-SYS DSP, control, and hardware platform fulfilled the vision of its creator Rich Zwiebel by adding the first of its video endpoints, the NV-32-H. With three HDMI in, two HDMI out and eight channels of audio in and out, the unit is set as an encoder or decoder within Q-SYS. In the already feature and option-rich Q-SYS environment, which just added Zoom integration directly from its touch panels without needing an external PC, video endpoints represent the last piece of the puzzle for total domination of networked AV.

Common to both Dante AV and the NV-32-H is the no-nonsense network and resolution specs; they both run on standard 1 gigabit networks and support 4K60 4:4:4. Staff at both stands emphasised they felt no need to force users onto 10 gigabit backbones, and no-one mentioned 8K or any other ultra-hi-res formats. Both are going for simple boxes that allow those familiar with audio networking to feel completely at home.

A full ISE show report will run in the March edition of CX Magazine, ‘The Networking Issue’, or jump on our Facebook page for live posts from the floor until late Thursday night Australian time!