SVG Sit Down: Evertz's Mo Goyal and Paul Shorter on Integrating the Legendary Studer Brand

SVG Sit Down: Evertz's Mo Goyal and Paul Shorter on Integrating the Legendary Studer Brand Updating familiar audio technology helps video-broadcast supplier expand its reach By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Wednesday, October 12, 2022 - 9:50 am

Print This Story | Subscribe

Story Highlights

Evertz Technologies' January 2021 acquisition of former Harman Pro brand Studer's technology and product assets breathed new life into what had been a formidable name in broadcast sound. The upcoming combined AES/NAB expo in New York will be a coming out of sorts for Studer 2.0, now part of what Evertz calls its Software Defined Video Networking (SDVN) solutions set.

Studer's base goes back to the two-track and multi-track tape decks that largely built the music-production industry from the 1960s through the '80s. Its analog-tape technology carried it into the digital 1990s, even as Studer was establishing itself in broadcast-audio and live-sound mixing with its Vista series of consoles. Updated Vista desks are still part of the conversation, in the form of the compact, 22-fader Vista 1 Carbon. The products join the Infinity-ST server core, which features a new CoreLink card audio interface that provides both IP-based ST 2110-30 and proprietary A-link native connectivity, and the Micro Series, a portable digital audio-mixing system comprising the core unit, a graphical user interface, and an optional fader-control surface.

Evertz's Mo Goyal: One of the driving factors of acquiring the Studer assets was expanding our live-production toolset.

SVG sat down with Evertz Manager, Product Marketing, Mo Goyal and Sales and Product Manager Paul Shorter - who previously handled Studer support under Harman - to discuss the fabled brand's new presence in a fast-changing broadcast-audio landscape.

How has the integration of Studer's audio progressed at Evertz in the past year, even as broadcast audio itself has undergone some rapid changes around IT and ST 2110?

Goyal: One of the driving factors of acquiring the Studer assets was that we were investing a lot of development time into expanding our live-production toolset, specifically around the DreamCatcher platform and what we call Bravo Studio and we felt that Studer would be a really good fit into that overall objective. There is a growing demand on being able to cost-effectively create content that would follow and parallel some larger productions. For example, [in football] we've seen that with ESPN [a reference to Manningcast]; the Amazon folks have done the same thing with a couple of different [streamcasts]. That has been a driving force: provide tools to cost-effectively produce those different feeds. Being able to provide the 2110 interfacing onto the system opens up the opportunities to position Studer into those facilities, as well as leading into our overall live-production strategy.

What were the biggest challenges from an internal integration perspective and within the broader context of the broadcast-audio sector?

Goyal: You're trying to manage that balance of not sacrificing the quality and feature sets that people have come to expect from Studer while modernizing the platforms so we could move forward into ST 2110 in the cloud. There definitely was some learning curve to understand how things could be implemented on the Studer side for that and how to integrate it with the Evertz engineering team.

Evertz's Paul Shorter: Immersive audio is definitely on the roadmap.

Is immersive audio for broadcast part of the future?

Shorter: It's definitely there; it's definitely on the roadmap. One of the things that we are currently doing is a full revamp of the Vista code, the actual application that runs the console. As part of that, we'll be able to introduce a number of extra facilities within the system.

One of those will be immersive audio and monitoring. It's one of the things that we've not been able to implement over the past few years. We've got workarounds for customers that need it now, but it's going be a much smoother process as we move forward to be able to enable all the immersive-audio facilities, as well as additional channel-[configuration] capabilities.

The obvious one is the monitoring. That has been one of the challenges that I think a lot of manufacturers have had: the need to toggle back and forth and check different types of mixes on the same program on the fly, various fold-downs, and things like that.

Where do the new and newer Studer products fit into the market?

Shorter: Let's start with the Micro Series. It's a small 12-channel mixing console with HTML5-type control as well as dedicated hardware faders. The beauty of the Micro is, it's pretty much ready to do cloud-style mixing already, so there's not a huge amount that we needed to do in that respect. In fact, we have a few customers that use it in broadcast sports already because it has the ability to have battery power; they can run the unit out to the location and do Power over Ethernet back to the main facility, regardless of where it is. I know people that are using it in golf: they have it maybe placed on the 18th hole, and the trucks [are] a couple of miles away. It sits easily and nicely into that type of environment.

Goyal: I think another environment would be where [there's no] infrastructure - say, [for] the baseball game in the middle of a cornfield [laughs]. And it can quite easily fit into a flypack as well without any issue.

The other end of that product lineup is the Vista 1 Carbon, a large-format console.

Shorter: The Vista One Carbon is an updated version of our original Vista One and Vista One Black Edition. A number of things had been asked for over the recent years. For instance, not everybody wanted the original I/O. They wanted to be able to ha

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2022/10/12/svg-sit-down-evertzs-mo-goyal-a...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines