PAUL ERLANDSON: Well, I am Paul Erlandson. I’m the director of product support for Lynx Studio Technology. We’re here at the AES Show in San Francisco ’08 showing our wares. We come every year. We can’t seem to get enough of this place. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about one of our newest products which is the AES16e. This is a PCIe adaptation of the AES16 card.

So, as a general overview, it’s 16 channels of AES/EBU in and out. There is also a version of it that has sample rate conversion, 16 channels of very high quality 10:1 sample rate conversion onboard, and yet a third variation includes AES50, which is a new multichannel protocol similar to MADI but with some very interesting control possibilities and very low jitter long cable runs, so that’s supported as well. There’s a few different ways to integrate PCIe, and so when we tackle this project we decided to do it, take the high road, and we didn’t use any sort of bridge technology. That would be a way of adapting our card quickly and cheaply but you’re not really experiencing the benefits of the PCIe bus. So, we did it correctly in our view, and as a result there is a significant performance enhancement over the AES16.

Mainly, the PCIe bus is capable of simultaneous reads and writes, so by taking advantage of that we can hit much lower latencies than we can with the regular PCI products. So, as an example, at 96 kHz you can hit around 8882 about a millisecond and a half, just quite impressive for a product like that.

So, it works with PCs on Windows including Vista, Vista 64, XP, you know, all the usual suspects, ASIO drivers and WDM, Kernel streaming as well as correct sound. On the Mac side, it works with both Mac Pros, Intel-based machines. It has Universal Binary drivers as well as G5’s with PCIe slots. Also again, very, very low latency under Core Audio. It’ll work with Logic, Digital Performer, Nuendo, Cubase, Peak, and all of the usual suspects.

So, there’s also hardware monitoring on the AES16e. We have enhanced our mixer. It now supports up to 10 channels per output so you can monitor all 16 inputs through a pair of outputs. So, you can assign what sources you want. They can either be record sources or playback streams. There’s one thing a little bit unique about our routing is that you can have multiple streams from a variety of sources feeding the same output. We’re also somewhat unique in that you can assign input sources to multiple record devices. So, for instance if you have a signal stereo source coming into the card, you can have that distributed to different applications or different tracks within the same application.

So, it’s very easy to use. It’s very high performance. It’s been popular to be paired with our Aurora converters. Since those use AES/EBUs, they’re naitive digital format, the AES16e paired with the Aurora is an ideal 16-channel analog solution A-to-D and D-to-A. There’s some control information that goes back and forth so the Aurora can be controlled through the AES16e. There is a software mixer for the Aurora where some of the controls can be implemented. Also, the firmware can be updated on the Aurora through the AES16e so there is a very tight level of connectivity between them. We have cables available to connect them through D-subs so two cables carry 16 channels in both directions, which is very convenient.

So, the AES16e has been shipping for half a year now. All versions are shipping except the AES50 which we anticipate to be shipping by the end of the year. It’s been very, very successful. You can put up to four cards in a single machine for up to a 64-channel solution, and it supports sample rates up to 192 kHz without losing any channel count. It does not scale so that can be 64-channels at 192 kHz or all the way down to 32 kHz per card. So, it’s been very successful and we look forward to it continuing to be so. And thank you for your time today.