Lawo Presents Radio Technology White Paper At NAB2017

Lawo, a thought leader in this rapidly-converging field, will present a white paper at BEITC entitled “Virtualizing Radio Studios: Broadcasting + IT = AoIP 2.0”, co-authored by Michael “Catfish” Dosch, Director of Virtual Projects, and Stephan Türkay, Senior Product Manager, Radio On-Air.

According to Türkay, “It’s only natural that radio wants to take advantage of the huge power available in today’s PC platforms. We eliminated tape machines and carts 20 years ago in favor of PCs, and PC power has doubled many times over since then, but we still use it in the studio just for playout! There’s a lot we can do with that power.”

“Virtualization has been a dominant trend in Information Technology over the past years,” notes Dosch. “IT has found that moving processes to Virtual Machines results in more scalable systems, more reliable infrastructure, and systems that can be quickly diagnosed and administered remotely. Moving audio mixing, codecs, phones, audio processing and other tools out of hardware, and into the virtual domain along with playout, will help broadcast studios to become more reliable, serviceable, and scalable too.”

“That’s why we refer to virtualization as ‘AoIP 2.0’”, Dosch says. “The first wave of AoIP united physical devices – the mixing console and audio peripherals – via Ethernet. The second wave will take the software apps that replace those physical devices and unite them, using IP inside a virtual machine environment.”

In their white paper, Dosch and Türkay will discuss the computing power now available to broadcasters, examine already-existing software tools that can be used to shift studio infrastructure from racks to the cloud, and give real-world examples of what such convergence looks like in modern broadcast plants.

The paper will be presented during the Radio Technology session at NAB 2017, on Monday, April 23, at 10AM.

About Lawo

Lawo designs and manufactures pioneering network, control, audio and video technology for broadcast and post production, as well as live performance and theatrical applications, developed in Germany and manufactured according to highest quality standards at the company’s headquarters in the Rhine valley town of Rastatt, Germany.

Lawo’s line of physical and virtual radio solutions include sapphire, sapphire compact and crystal mixing surfaces, crystal CLEAR and RƎLAY Virtual Radio Mixers, and advanced VisTool GUI-builder software, all designed to provide more capability for less cost.