Audio Exhibitors Showcase New Platforms, Innovative Solutions for Complex Issues

IP integration, interoperability, growth of intercommunications were key concerns for vendors and visitors alike

Attendees at the recently concluded 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas had plenty to ponder, and audio was a large part of it. In addition to considerable concerns about perennial issues, such as spectrum allocation and management, the entire industry - sound and picture - is enmeshed in a tectonic upheaval of media giants consuming each other, as Skydance/Paramount aims its Oracle-funded billions at Warner/Discovery (whose shareholders voted to accept the bid the day after the show ended) and jilted suitor Netflix implements another price increase. On the technical side, the industry continued aggressively moving toward cloud-native, IP-driven (SMPTE ST 2110) production and remote-production infrastructures to replace legacy on-premises systems.

Audio saw its share of that action.

The Perennial Challenge: Doing More With Less

A lot of our customers are facing quite challenging environments, observes Henry Goodman, director, product management, Calrec. They've got to create more content for less. They've got to do it on small amounts of money. And they've got to try to change pretty fast to get that happening.

Recent product development, he adds, has been based on developing more choices within Calrec's product ecosystem for that. You've got customers in a whole load of different situations. And that's down to facility-wide situations or even down to specific shows. People are looking at doing individual productions in different ways and to maximize the output, getting content at different levels, not just doing the premium-property sports productions but getting more content out of lower-end productions as well.

Phrasing it in an almost existential way, he adds, I can't do those in the traditional way, with a truck, because it's just not economically viable to do that [anymore]. So how can I use the resources I've got to stand that production up in ways that I've never done it before to make that economically viable for me? Those are the questions we're answering.

At Solid State Logic, in a large booth shared with Calrec and DiGiCo - all part of Audiotonix, which also this year consolidated the acquisitions of DPA and Wisycom in a major pro-audio M&A - SSL Broadcast Product Manager Bernie Carpenter says remote production has been a fertile field for IP integration but that has been somewhat slowed by the need for additional training for crews, at a time when many in the industry are aging out. AI may help with that, he says, adding caveats: I think there are places where you can have assistive tools, but I think that's very different from replacing a person or function.

Also helping is a trend toward software-defined production. The processing can happen on an off-the-shelf server rather than needing to go and buy a black box from different manufacturers just to do one function; it's software as a service in a sense, he explains. You'll still want faders at the end of the day, you still need an operator. They still want to sit there and mix in the same way, but the backend technology is coming on leaps and bounds.

Interoperability and Greater Openness

Interoperability between platforms was also a theme. It's all about enabling that interoperability for the workflow, notes Joshua Rush, CMO, Audinate, parent of Dante. In response, we've announced changes to our SMPTE 2110 and AES67 integration that allow you to support this trend. In fact, one of the biggest challenges this year is the upgrade to IP workflows.

IP has essentially crossed the chasm, he continues. The majority of broadcasters are now adopting SMPTE 2110 and upgrading to IP workflows, and I think that, in and of itself, is a challenge in that interoperability is what we've been focusing on with Dante.

Sennheiser Technical Application Engineer Chris Phillips agrees. His company's newest strategic direction, he notes, is toward greater openness and interoperability: for example, a new Bitfocus Companion control module for Sennheiser's wireless systems allows users to build custom, open-source control interfaces to remotely manage wireless packs and reassign frequencies/resources. The goal is to move away from closed systems and toward software that integrates with broader broadcast workflows.

The walled garden' model is ending as customers demand interoperable systems, he says, adding that the company wants its microphones, wireless gear, and endpoints to work more seamlessly with third-party systems across broadcasting and live production. We want to work better with the rest of the chain than maybe we had in the past.

Complexity and Intercommunications

Intercoms are developing as a growth category, thanks, say systems vendors, to the increasing complexity and scale of live events, especially live and televised sports, where more and more diverse kinds of comms are required.

We're not making more spectrum, so we went to cellular because it's a technology that has existed for 30 years, says Dave MacKinnon, VP, product management,Clear-Com, discussing the company's new FreeSpeak Cell system, introduced at the show. It's billions of dollars to iterate it and refine it, and it gets us a huge amount of capacity and a huge amount of range. Just to give you an idea: our average system right now is 40-50 beltpacks in an arena-type environment because that's literally all you can fit. Cellular adds capacity and range.

Cellular spectrum has become a focus of the sector as, ironically, consumer cellular companies grab more spectrum. However, it's a complex operating region. It's a difficult engineering problem, he continues, because cellular, while it's well-known, is also very

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/04/27/audio-exhibitors-showcase-new-p...
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