Fairlight bringing new hardware and software to AES convention - AES News

Post, Oct, 2003

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- Fairlight is back in business and attending the AES show in New York City this month. The company will introduce Station plus, a new integrated mixer/editor designed for commercial audio applications. It will also give existing Station customers an upgrade path to the "plus" version's enhanced functionality.

Station plus doubles the capacity of the Station mixer/editor, which was introduced in 2002. Users can now configure the system with additional busses and live feeds, taking it from 56 channels and 24 busses to 144 channels and busses. This is accomplished by increasing the number of DSP cards (to four) in the QDC chasis and with some subtle changes to the user interface. Upgrades will cost users $2,500 for the software license and $8,750 for the additional DSP cards.

Station plus also features the new Version 18.2 QDC operating system and Version 3.1 DREAM Series user interface. Version 18.2 software enables automation data to follow audio clips selected for editing. The new V.3.1 software provides additional zoom windows and user-definable track select modes on the edit display.

And, Fairlight (www.fairlightau.com) is bringing the mixing power of its QDC engine to its installed base of Satellite, Merlin and MFX3.48 digital audio workstations with the introduction of SoftMix, a PC based mixing control application that gives these systems surround mixing capabilities along with track-based dynamics and equalization, and support for the company's Plug-Ins Manager 5.

SoftMix helps eliminate the need for an external mixer and where there is one in place, provides plugs-ins, routing and sub mixing capability to increase the speed and flexibility of the workflow environment.

The SoftMix system is available as three separate modules--SoftMix, is the core package which runs on Windows 2000 or XP, costs $1,000 and provides either 24-track or 48-track configurations of HFX3.48 or Satellite. SoftMix plug-ins, which are available for an additional $1,000, include equalization and dynamics and support for the company's Plug-Ins Manager 5. And thirdly, SoftMix Automation adds dynamic automation to the functionality of SoftMix plug-ins. Upgrading from SoftMix Core to SoftMix Automation costs $500.