AES 2015: Merging reveals Convention plans

Merging Technologies is celebrating 25 years in the business with a range of announcements in preparation for its appearance at the AES Convention in New York from the 29 October – 1 November.

Recent successes for the company include the 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 development for Horus and Hapi.

Merging has announced it has streamlined its Pyramix bundles in order to remove rarely purchased combinations. Additionally, any purchaser of Horus or Hapi before the end of 2015 will automatically receive a Pyramix Essentials pack included, and will be offered an upgrade to a more advanced pack for the retail price of the free pack. 

With the company’s transition to 64bit processing for all software programs, Pyramix 10 and Ovation 6 now offer 3D panning that can manipulate the audio to any number of speakers in any position in a room of any size, as demonstrated at ISE this year.

Following the news that Merging and CEDAR Audio have entered into a non-exclusive license agreement, the manufacturer has also lifted the curtain on the new CEDAR for Pyramix 64 plug-in suite which boasts 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 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 range of VST plug-ins allowing an array of effects.

The firm has also begun shipment of its PT64 card, in response to the increasing popularity of Horus and Hapi in the Pro Tools community. 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, PT64 brings Pro Tools into the RAVENNA/AES67 world, as well as being able to utilise the array of digital I/O that comes as standard on these converters.

Acording to the firm, Independent Audio has continued to ship an ‘unprecedented’ quantity of DSD capable recording systems as the popularity of DSD/DXD downloads increases steadily. In response, the company’s Product specialist, Dennis Gaines, will be joined 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.

Cellier commented: “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.”

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