Rethinking the Matrix - Part 1

Not-so-newcomers to installation since 1995!

I can understand the suspicion. When a hi-fi brand suddenly wants us to trust their refrigerators, or when a prestige car company debuts a new pickup, it always raises a few eyebrows. Is it a rebadged product? Do they understand this market? So when we revealed a new thoroughbred installation matrix processor - the AHM-64 - I wasn't too surprised when a few people asked me why a successful live sound brand like Allen & Heath was moving into the install business. But the truth is, we’ve been designing dedicated products for consultants and integrators for a quarter of a century. Our first foray into install was the GR1 zone mixer – the progenitor of an unbroken line of GR series analogue products that has been in constant production ever since. Our first digital matrix processor, DR128, followed in 1996, quickly joined by its trimmed down sibling, DR66. Back in those day the whole digital R&D team could’ve fitted in a Mini Cooper – a far cry from today’s 50-strong department, half of which is now devoted to software development. 

The product that really put us on the installation map was iDR8, launched back in 2002 and pictured here below. The iDR8 processor and its expanders, together with the companion iDR System Manager software, brought top audio quality to installed sound and paved the way for our first live digital mixers. The release of the slimline iDR4 extended the reach of iDR into smaller installs such as hotels, restaurants, bars, and boardrooms. A companion range of remote controllers, the PL series, introduced a new level of flexibility and was undoubtedly a key ingredient of iDR’s appeal. Nine different PL units were developed, including a variety of wall plates, a fader panel and an expansion hub.

iDR installations ranged from the glamorous Ferrari store in Rome and baroque Vienna Konzerthaus to the plush executive suites of the Hong Kong Jockey Club and London’s revered Natural History Museum. Not to mention dozens of Cheesecake Factory restaurants across the USA. Peep behind the scenes at many blue-chip companies, government facilities and theme parks and you’ll find iDR still doing sterling service today. Integrators are normally a calm, reasonable bunch, but we got some uncharacteristically fiery emails when we finally had to close the order book for iDR a few years ago - iDR sounded great, it was quick to set up, and it was reliable. Why change?

The technology leap

More recently, we have enjoyed great success with our dLive series in the installation market. The decision to deploy a new FPGA engine, running at 96kHz and packing dozens of parallel cores into a single chip, was key to the success of dLive in live sound. It eliminated the limitations of classic DSP farm topology, with benefits in terms of raw power, latency and phase coherency. And while most competitors were sticking to the mixer = control + processing + I/O in one place, we took a fundamentally different approach. We already had the advantage of a separate mix engine (the MixRack) that could be deployed with or without a control surface, and went a step further by creating an unprecedented range of distributed I/O and control options.  

We began to develop new dLive hardware specifically for fixed install, including the DM0 audio engine, the DX164-W wall-mount audio expander, the IP1 single-gang wallplate (joining a range of PoE powered remote controllers), the DX Hub for more flexible audio distribution, and a networkable GPIO interface. Software features like Automatic Mic Mixing and remote control over WAN were also introduced to aid adoption in different installation verticals. This distributed architecture makes dLive a natural fit for multi-purpose venues seeking to handle everything from background music and announcements to a full orchestra performance with a single solution. The mixer doesn't have to sit at FoH or in a control room any longer - it's everywhere, spread across the building, be it a university campus or bank headquarter (500-seat auditorium in TMB Bangkok pictured below).

In the next part, we'll be looking at how the dLive and iDR paths have converged into a new matrix concept.