Apart from celebrating its survival as an independent company for 25 years despite
seismic shifts in the pro-audio market, global recessions, extraordinary currency
fluctuations and other factors beyond the company’s control, Merging Technologies
has many more reasons to celebrate. The recent shipment of the 500th Hapi; the
launching of its High End home audio brother, NADAC; the 10th iteration of Pyramix
complete with integrated 3D audio workflows; new versions of Ovation and VCube
and a significant development for Horus and Hapi are just a few reasons for the
company to arrive in New York in an ebullient mood.
Coincident with all the technical and feature enhancements, Pyramix bundles have
changed from being user designated to being defined by the feature set. Over
recent years, user definitions had become extremely blurred and a little over
complex. The streamlining of these packs remove some rarely purchased
combinations and lends itself well to be a major ingredient of the 25th Anniversary
offer. Any purchaser of Horus or Hapi between now and the end of 2015
automatically gets a Pyramix Essentials pack included. This is a great pack to cut
one’s teeth on, as the advantages of Pyramix from the recording and editing
standpoint are plentiful. And, should you require more than what is offered by
Essentials, you can upgrade to a more advanced pack and be credited the retail
price of the free pack. The current surge in popularity for high resolution audio
downloads in DSD and DXD has led to an increasing number of users looking for
alternatives to their current software. This package lets them create and work with
real projects to learn the intrinsic benefits that Pyramix offers.
Pyramix 10 and Ovation 6 take full advantage of the company’s transition to 64bit
processing for all software programs, and now offer 3D panning that can manipulate
the audio to any number of speakers in any position in a room of any size. This can
obviously be used as the front end mix engine to any of the defined immersive
audio formats such as Auro 3D, Dolby Atmos and DTS X.
Enhanced 64bit plug-ins have been appearing over the last year culminating in the
new Cedar for Pyramix 64 suite which has drastically enhanced features compared
with the former Cedar Tools offering. In addition to Retouch 7™, Auto and Manual
Declick, Auto Decrackle, Auto Dehiss, and Dethump have all been significantly
improved and benefit from the 64bit transition.
Other 64 bit VS3 plug-ins from long term Merging partners such as Flux, Dirac,
Vincent Burel, Voicode and Algorithmix are all now available and with a vast
number of VST plug-ins allowing an astounding array of effects, there is no limit to
the creative possibilities for live and post applications.
The increasing popularity of Horus and Hapi in the Pro Tools community led to
requests to improve the latency when used with HD systems. The PT64 card is the
perfect plug in solution for HDX connectivity. PT64 takes one card slot in Hapi or
Horus and offers a 64 channel bi-directional connection. The cards can be doubled
up to provide 128 channels in a single device. In addition to the obvious
performance improvements, PT64 brings Pro Tools into the RAVENNA/AES67 world,
as well as being able to utilize the vast array of digital I/O that comes as standard
on these converters. The astounding quality and headroom of the mic preamps and
the state of the art A/D and DA conversion is a further bonus for the serious Pro
Tools user. PT64 is shipping now.
Independent Audio continues to ship an unprecedented quantity of DSD capable
recording systems as the popularity of DSD/DXD downloads increases steadily.
Product Specialist, Dennis Gaines, will be joined on booth # 747 at the 139th AES in
New York by Merging’s President, Claude Cellier and Head of Software Engineering,
Dominique Brulhart. Demonstrations of all the Merging range of products will be
available on the show floor.
Claude Cellier, Merging’s President, had this to say; “You are never sure what each
year will bring but we could not have planned a better time to reach our quarter
century. Pyramix still advances year by year and V 10 is a significant release for
us; Ovation sales are growing well; 500 Hapi units shipped; the successful launch of
NADAC. I think we can certainly claim that 2015 is a vintage year for Merging.’