May 2013 l 37


“The amount of possible integration is pivotal to the ergonomics of an intercom system“


Nico Lewis, RTS Intercoms


good price”. Responding to this the company has introduced improvements to its Gateway configuration editor, allowing engineers to use advanced intercom functions more easily. On the networking side


Sparrow says more manufacturers have approached Trilogy to discuss compatibility with formats such as OCA, Dante, AVB and Ravenna. “The majority of these have analogue audio, AES, MADI and IP interfaces and Gemini is proven to interface to any of these standards, making the most of low latency networks such as Ravenna,” he comments. According to Vinnie Macri,


Control room of the Red Bull Stratos project, where Felix


Baumgartner jumped from space, courtesy of Riedel Communications


norm is still uncertain: “The industry has to make a choice but all these platforms are in the first place developed for one-way digital audio transport. Whether they are the best solution for the two-way audio of intercom remains to be seen.” Trilogy Communications made the first move into intercom using Voice-over-IP (VoIP) in 1999 with the Mercury system. This later developed into a distributed


matrix intercom, Gemini, which remains Trilogy’s flagship product. The company launched Messenger, an intermediate product at CABSAT 2013, to bridge what it saw as the gap between Gemini and lower end two-wire party lines. John Sparrow, Trilogy’s


product sales manager, says many customers today are looking for a “flexible, user-friendly system with comprehensive features at a


product marketing manager at Clear-Com: “Everybody is looking for low latency QoS [quality of service] connectivity.” He continues that each of the newer IP transport platforms offers some sort of timing features and prioritisation. “We’ve been selling IP solutions for a long time and the comms has always been easily implemented. Fearful issues like latency and timing have not interfered with our successful system implementations and interfacing. All of this to us is application


driven. We’ve had meetings and have conducted exhausting research talks with networking hardware giants who see no long- term plans to go in any of these directions. We broke our crystal ball a long time ago so we do not


broadcastfeature


have an opinion on which approach might win favour with audio professionals.” Delec Audio and Video


Technology, on the other hand, has made an early commitment to AVB for Audio-over-IP (AoIP) using Dante. “It is the technology for the near future,” comments company founder Donald Dilocker. “Our Dante I/O boards can be seen as an intermediate until AVB is fully released. Our customers then only need to update the Dante boards to participate in the AVB standard.” Dilocker sees both AVB and OCA as important for the future: “AVB opens up to integrated video transmission easily and the OCA Alliance offers a variety of new and product-overlapping control options.” Delec and the other companies of Salzbrenner Stagetec Mediagroup are founding members of the OCA Alliance. During Prolight + Sound the company hosted a reception to discuss the Alliance and recruit new members.


MIXED MARKET The general feeling about the intercom market is that it is in an intermediate state right now, with digital dominating but analogue still in there. Dilocker feels that while the demand for analogue is decreasing it will not disappear completely until the last systems in broadcast are replaced by those working on IP networks.


INTERCOM AT THE END OF THE 20TH CENTURY


BACK IN 1999 the intercom market faced many challenges and problems that would be familiar today. Networking round studio centres, ever-growing OB sites, music venues and theatres was becoming a major consideration, with manufacturers and engineers looking at either replacing analogue with digital, combining the two or extending the capabilities of existing technologies. Analogue two- and four-


wire systems were still firmly in the picture but there was realisation that the tide was turning in favour of digits. Just how much influence they would have was still not fully appreciated. One proposed approach to networking was interfacing ISDN, T1 telecom lines or even satellite with digital long lines. Back then ISDN was the


established broadcast inter- communications system and showed no sign of being replaced. A few months later in 1999 a new intercom system based on something called IP appeared. The intercom and pro-audio world began to change from then on.


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