JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com on the floor of AES 2006 in San Francisco and I'm here with Jamie Anderson from EAW. How are you?

JAMIE ANDERSON: I'm doing good.

JOE WALLACE: Tell me a little bit about the EAW UX-8800.

JAMIE ANDERSON: Well the UX-8800 processor was developed specifically so that we can apply the advanced Gunness Focusing Alignment technology that we've -- is embodied in the NT series of loudspeakers, to be able to apply that to our conventionally powered arrays like the KF-760 and the 730 established systems out there but to bring them to the higher level that we were able to do with the NT systems with the captured electronics.

JOE WALLACE: Now, can you give me a few features of the unit?

JAMIE ANDERSON: Sure. It's based on a 4 x 8 framework where you could run it as just a standard system processor with full EQ, limiting, delay that you would expect in a 4 x 8, but really the focus of this is being able to create predetermined, preconfigured EAW crossover units for loudspeakers with the high-end Gunness Focusing Alignments and a purpose-built limiter circuits including things, because we know exactly what the drivers are in the boxes that we're driving here. We're able to set the limiters intelligently to deal with excursion and what the true RMS and peak handling powers of the drivers are. What the user simply does is for each input channel, the user chooses from a list of preconfigured crossovers. We'll have all of the EAW products in the library in the unit, and you would just call up the unit and then assign output channels based on the output configuration required. So it's meant to be extremely simple, the user is asked to input the gain of the amplifier that they're driving of course so you can get the crossover right, and then the max output voltage of the amplifiers that their driving so that we can get the limiting right. And after that, the user has a full set of front-end EQ, delay, level control that they need for doing system alignment while retaining the full, preconfigured crossover settings from the factory for the EAW loudspeaker. We call it Gray Box Processing. Basically, you got the black box which is set up for the unit and it's gray because you've got controls in front of it as well.

JOE WALLACE: Now when does this hit the street?

JAMIE ANDERSON: This hits the street in Q1 next year. We'll -- The units are going to be in the field being tested for the next few months, late January, early February is when there should be product availability on this.

JOE WALLACE: All right. Great. We've been talking with Jamie Anderson from EAW. I'm Joe Wallace from Gearwire.Com.