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

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 have more flexibility, so we basically dropped the I/O. There has been a couple of modifications internally, but it’s generally very similar in operation to the existing [consoles]. We’ve just given a bit more flexibility up front and given it a nice new name.

Vista One Carbon can fit a number of situations. It’s very good for small facilities, where there’s not a lot of physical room and where they want something that would potentially be an analog-replacement console. It drops in nicely because it’s got the I/O built into the surface.

It works well with road cases; it fits nicely into a flight pack to be transportable. We have a number of them used in OB trucks doing things like college baseball and college basketball, environments where they don’t need the big truck and want something smaller. So the Vista One in its 22- or its 32-fader format gives you exactly the same amount of I/O processing just with a different physical surface: you’ve got a lot of power but within a very small footprint. That’s one of the key things with the Vista One: it really does have the ability to drop in and be ready to run almost immediately.

And that brings us to the Infinity T server core. Is that the pathway deeper into IP?
Shorter: Studer had the Infinity series for a while; our big challenge was how to incorporate 2110-30. What we’ve done is take the same live–media-node servers that we use on the other Evertz products and make some changes in the software to make it work for us as an Infinity core. We’ve added a new FPGA card in place of our original proprietary card. That gives us that ability to expand into an area we’d not been able to before.

Evertz’s knowledge and understanding of 2110 has [enabled] us to move this forward quickly. Twelve months ago, this was just someone sitting there with a pen and paper going, Oh, this would be nice. And here we are now with a server core.

Some of the things that stand out with this particular core is that we can still do the original Studer A-link audio interface as well as 2110, and that means that we can bridge the gap for people that already have Vista and are wanting to transition into IP. We can actually do that with this core without having to literally rip out everything right from the get-go. So we have that ability to go into a greenfield environment straight away as a 2110-type core, or we can go into an existing infrastructure and utilize the interface with the A-link and transition across to the 2110 environment. It’s retrofittable to any existing Infinity-based system, so there’s an upgrade path for those as well.

Goyal: I’d just like to add that I think that one of the big challenges was that, when we acquired the Studer assets, it was done during COVID, so it got kind of lost in the haze. People didn’t see it presented in a physical way at trade shows, because there were no trade shows! When we did the NAB Show in Las Vegas and then IBC [in Amsterdam], there were a lot of people who were very excited to see Studer again, under the Evertz brand, knowing that we can continue to support it. That was an eye-opener to me because we realized we needed to let the industry know, Hey, Studer never really left, and we’re here to move it forward into the next generation of audio.