Integrated Systems Europe 2024 - What Does It Mean for the Audio Industry?

I returned from Barcelona, Spain, after five exhausting days, which were not easy for anyone in the audio industry who was forced to fly from the NAMM Show in Anaheim, CA directly to Europe. I wrote this First Impressions ISE 2024 report in an effort to summarize this extremely well organized and successful event - celebrating the show's 20th anniversary. I discuss what is sustaining this systems integration event that everyone understands as many different things, and what does it means for the audio industry.

As the OCA Alliance celebrates the publication of the latest update to the AES70 suite of standards for control and monitoring of devices in professional media networks, one of the OCA members, DeusO GmbH, unveiled AUX Panel, a software for system integrators looking for flexible control touch interfaces. At the OCA booth, AUX Panel is being used to demonstrate control of a series of available development boards and AES70-ready systems.

The Audio Engineering Society (AES), Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), SMPTE, and the Video Services Forum (VSF) will once again promote the IP Showcase at the 2023 NAB Show, April 15-19 in Las Vegas. The event is intended to inform attendees on a wide range of IP-related topics, while providing an opportunity to share ideas in a new meetup section.

The OCA Alliance will offer a sneak peek of the latest version of the AES70 device control standard at ISE 2022. The AES70-2022 release, originally intended to be released in 2021, will be upwards-compatible from the current AES70-2018 and offers several significant enhancements for new and improved features along with several documentation upgrades for increased clarity, readability and precision.

DeusO GmbH has released a software named AES70 Explorer to support hardware engineers developing or integrating AES70 into Pro Audio devices. AES70 Explorer is designed to connect, expose and control parameters in OCA objects. The software provides a UI builder for fast setup of engineering interfaces and can simultaneously test multiple devices using an array of Pro Audio control widgets.

Merging Technologies has gained a justifiable reputation for supplying enabling tools for AES67/Ravenna AoIP networks that have more recently been incorporated into the ST2110 standards. The freeware CoreAudio VAD has been downloaded thousands of times and the Linux ALSA driver has found favor with a number of OEMs. Meanwhile, the ASIO driver supplied with Merging interfaces was beginning to show its age and lacked some key features. In response, Merging introduced a new Merging Audio Device (MAD) driver, which totally redefines possibilities and introduces a new enhanced MAD Infrastructure option.

Centre stage on the OCA Alliance booth at the recent ISE show was the expanded feature set of the new AES70-2018 revision of the open control and monitoring standard for professional audio and AV media networks. The result of several years of collaborative work within the OCA Alliance and the AES, AES70-2018 is an evolutionary upgrade providing numerous new and improved features.