Alteros Aims at a New RF Landscape

Audio-Technica subsidiary sees changes bigger than spectrum reallocation

The wireless-microphone industry has been busily retooling for the post–spectrum-auction world with an array of new and updated products. Audio-Technica is responding with an entirely new company.

Announced during the AES Show in Los Angeles last September, the new subsidiary, dubbed Alteros, occupies a separate building across the street from A-T’s U.S. headquarters in Stow, OH. Its first product is the GTX wireless series, which will operate in the 6.5 GHz range and provide up to 24 channels of wireless audio without the need for frequency coordination. The three-piece system — transmitter, transceiver, and control unit — was developed by Alteros’s staff of eight engineers and is being manufactured in San Jose, CA, rather than in Ohio or Japan.

Alteros’s Jackie Green: “Like other businesses, the [broadcast] business has evolved from one focused on capex to one focused on opex, looking for operational improvements. Alteros is intended to address that evolution.”

“There are massive changes taking place in broadcast workflows and other operations,” she explains. “Alteros is a reaction to that, to how things are changing operationally. Like other businesses, the [broadcast] business has evolved from one focused on capex to one focused on opex, looking for operational improvements. Alteros is intended to address that evolution.”

Green points out that wireless audio needs to adapt to a changing operational environment. For instance, the putative propagation limitations of the GHz bands are actually an advantage, reducing the potential for signal interference as studio operations increasingly deploy wireless audio systems. Operating in the 6.5 GHZ range and beyond — next-generation products could work in the range of 10 GHz and higher, she says — the systems insulate users from what she calls “spectrum risk,” which is being complicated by the increased use of potentially RF-spurious platforms, such as LED walls. Furthermore, Alteros systems will be networkable from the start, with the GTX product natively Dante/AES67-enabled and able to interface with the network RAVENNA protocol using an interface card.

Alteros’s broader mission, according to Green, stems from the fact that, even after this round of spectrum reallocation is completed, broadcasters and other users will be looking at a permanently constrained RF landscape, with a 20% more crowded UHF/VHF range. The advantages of the ultra-wide–band (UWB) range more than outweigh its limitations, she asserts. It has no license, registration, or permission requirements. And operating that far up the RF spectrum, GTX and subsequent products offer up to 24 channels of wireless operation that can be set up in minutes, since it doesn’t require frequency coordination.

GTX and subsequent products will use an open architecture, allowing modular mix-and-match with system components, Green explains. Future versions will offer Ethernet connectivity for the GTX3224 control unit for remote monitoring and control. (Those functions now go through the control unit’s RS232 port.) The system is different from conventional wireless microphones at a very fundamental level: instead of carrier-based system control, GMX uses a pulse-based TDMA approach with Alteros’s own clock-sync and cable-compensation technologies. And the GTX transceivers and control unit connect via up to 1,000 ft. of Cat 5 cabling. Combined with the use of FPGA integrated circuits, the GTX may owe more of its genesis to IT than to pro audio.

The GTX has been tested in the field, in large and midsize venues, and in the studio, by at least one major broadcast-sports network, which Green declines to identify. A version intended to work with “super venues,” such as the largest NFL stadiums and campus-based events, such extreme sports, is under development. It will be ready for shipping by the second quarter of this year, with pricing “comparable” with that of other high-end professional UHF wireless microphones; the next round of products is scheduled for 2018.

“It’s a very different world now for wireless audio, and not just because of RF reallocation,” says Green. “We’re designing RF products for how the industry is going to need to work in the future as well as now. Our base is still pro audio, but, as we move up into the 6 GHz-10 GHz ranges, we’re entering new territory, and we need new thinking to go with that.”