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Studer’s Vista consoles have been the choice of the production mixing elite for some time now. Studer figured out how to use touchscreens in a particularly intuitive manner – dubbed Vistonics and borrowed by some of the high-end Soundcraft designs — and the use of coloured LEDs to help solve the assignability knobs/faders conundrum (again, borrowed by Soundcraft). The latest Vista console has now introduced a new processing engine — using CPU-based processors. The idea here is that SHARC chips are getting long in the tooth (arf!), and FPGA, although plenty powerful enough, are very difficult to program for. Meanwhile, the ‘Infinity’ DSP core, which uses CPU-based processors, combines the best of both words, providing huge numbers of DSP channels for large-scale, high-resolution audio processing and mixing. How ‘large scale’? Studer reckons it squeezed 800 audio channels from a single CPU-based board. This offers significant advantages, as CPU processing provides a scalable system, faster development of new signal processing designs, huge channel counts, full system redundancy without a single point of failure and the possibility of running third-party algorithms. The new Infinity DSP engine provides 12 A-Link high-capacity fibre digital audio interfaces, providing more than 5000 inputs and outputs. A newly designed high-density I/O system – D23m, is used to break out these A-Link connections to standard analogue, digital and video interfaces. The A-Link interface also provides direct connection to the Riedel MediorNet distributed router, allowing many Infinity systems to be connected together with router capacities of 10,000 square or more.

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When engineers start inventing uses for your products for you, simply because they like them so much, it’s not hard to see where the next step in development should be… Just follow the crowd. Enter the hard man of the Studer Vista range.

Text: Paul Mac

I make no secret of my admiration for what Studer has achieved in the past few years with the Vista series of consoles. Both the main Vistonics interface and the rest of the surface have been thought out so wonderfully well that no one could really deny the company praise. More recently, a fruitful collaboration with Soundcraft has yielded the Vi6 and Vi4 complete with Vistonics 2, which is essentially a simplified version of the graphic interface with in-situ knobs and buttons that can adapt to the task at hand.

A growing number of clients have been taking core Vista boards out on the road with much success, so it was only a matter of time before the Vista 5 – with a function set so well suited to live broadcast production – got a sibling that was wholly dedicated to life on the road.

A side room at this year’s PLASA show was the setting for an ‘unofficial’ launch, but the floor at the year’s American AES show was the main launch pad. I got a chance to meet with Studer at PLASA to get a sneak peek at the Vista 5 SR and the specifics that make it a tour-ready product.

TOUR READY

First off, it should be noted that the ergonomic value of the Vista line, and specifically the Vista 5, was a primary driving force. One-touch-everything, coupled with adaptive graphics that sit directly beneath the relevant controls will make the V5 very attractive to live sound engineers. But it’s one thing getting the wired-side right, and quite another to make sure all the technology holds together inside a flightcase. “So what we’ve done,” I was told by Studer, “is we’ve taken the Vista 5 and ‘done a job on it’… basically, making it more rugged… which means taking a look at every nut, bolt and screw in the console, and making it really solid for the road.”

In fact, a standard Vista 5 has been on tour with a big touring act for over two months now, with reportedly no problems – but there’s always room for improvement. First up, the rear section of the console has been raked upwards even further. That section holds the Vistonics screens and controls, and some metering and monitoring functions. So, while the faders are still there right in front of you, the channels, processing and everything else do not stretch into the distance beyond; nor do they get side swiped onto a generic master channel section; nor do you have to play ‘stand-up, sit-down’ through the entire set just because you were unlucky enough to be born with only to average-sized arms.

In addition, the system has had a thermal and structural makeover. Ventilation has been updated. There are now fans inside the surface, and the CPU has redundant cooling. Externally, everything from the side cheeks and the hand rest, to the main frame and the metal work has been reassessed and re-worked.

OUT OF THE BOX

Another big difference is that the open-ended configuration of the standard Vista 5 has been reigned in just a little to make the product more attractive and less daunting to hire customers. Specifically, this means standardising the I/O to two racks – one local, one stage – connected via MADI (with redundant option). The stage box has 85 mic inputs, eight line outputs, and eight AES I/Os; and the local rack having 48 line outputs, 16 line inputs, 16 AES I/Os and two MADI ports. Furthermore the I/O is expandable, and CobraNet, Aviom cards etc will be available to SR applications that specify these standards.
To support the expansions there will be a set of standard templates for the channel/bus structure, which in Vista land is entirely flexible. Thus, while the console could be configured in just about any way you like (within the constraints of the I/O and DSP availability), there will be ‘out-of-the-box’ configurations for monitor and FOH duties that will take the hard work out of setup – think of them as leg-ups, not limits.

The desk is lit with brighter LEDs than the Vista 5, and there’s a special ‘warm’ light under a slight overhang at the top of the rake that prevents things getting too ‘stark’.

There’s already at least one tour married to the Vista 5 SR, even before its official launch, which is a sign of the trust and admiration the ‘Vista way’ already courts. (If you want to know more about the Vista 5 in detail then head back to AT Issue 52.) Aside from the physical mods, standardised I/O, and the other enhancements mentioned, this console is still a tried and tested Vista 5 underneath – which is a great place to start.

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Specs can be massaged, but great ergonomics are either present or not. Enter Studer’s Vistonics user interface – live production mixing may never be the same.

Text: Paul Mac

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Studer’s HQ in Switzerland for a preview of the latest in the Vista series of digital consoles. The Studer Vista 5 is aimed squarely at the live production sector, whether that be broadcast, outside broadcast, or venue. The omission of dynamic automation is testimony to these clear intentions – a sophisticated snapshot system is all the automation a time-constrained, ‘real-time’ audio engineer requires. The other big difference between this console and others in the Vista range is the fact the Vista 5 is delivered as a fixed frame surface incorporating 32 fader strips – 20 of which are input strips, and 12 of which are ‘versatile’ (more on that later). It’s also the first ‘portable’ Vista. Of course, portable is a relative term, but the Vista 5 has been designed to be easy to set up and take down. Along these lines, it’s also the only ‘legless’ Vista – there’s even a standard flightcase option. Rounding off the key differences, Vista 5 does not have a hefty, high-res meterbridge option – the multi-colour LED channel metering is right alongside the faders.

HEART & SOUL

Like the other Vistas, the 5’s I/O and DSP core are fully configurable and scalable – you can opt for over 1700 inputs and outputs if the application requires it (although the surface will ‘only’ actually control 240 at one time). However, the Studer I/O can also act as your very own broadcast router (complete with Pro-Bel protocol control), so the extra I/O could be a significant consideration for some.

The Vista 5 is the first new Vista to ship with Studer’s updated SCore Live system core and local I/O box, which offers space saving, and raw power improvements over its predecessor (the old core was 9U and needed 20 cards to achieve half the processing power of the nine cards in SCore Live). SCore Live is a 6U rack unit and provides all the slots necessary for the DSP cards, the Bridge card (control and communications mostly), GP I/O cards, and 12 slots for your choice of audio I/O. There’s a healthy selection of I/O cards, including four-channel mic/line cards, eight-channel line cards, 16-channel digital cards, an eight-channel SDI card, and a 56/64-channel MADI card, and most recently, a Dolby E Decoder card.

Further core space is saved thanks to the omission of cooling fans. The cards in SCore Live monitor their own temperature and report to the central processor. If anything goes awry, you’ll know about it. Of course, if you think your work environment will need the extra cooling then optional fan racks can be fitted, but Studer argues that 90 percent of users won’t need them, so why introduce unnecessary noise for the majority of users?

Another upgrade relates to the sync. The old core just had an AES/EBU sync input, relying on external clocking for that format. SCore Live accepts AES/EBU, wordclock, and video reference clocks. Equally, it can provide the clock source with an onboard generator for distribution to the rest of the setup. As with virtually everything else on this console, you can fit a redundant clock, but even if you don’t and the clock disappears, operation will continue until it reappears, and then the system will ‘wheel’ slowly back into sync. One nice touch is the external selector panel option – it connects with one cable and offers ‘remote’ routing and monitoring control. Of course, if you’re using it as a big posh producer switch, you won’t need the cable!

To expand the SCore Live system, you can add more local I/O (3U, 12-slot boxes connect via a proprietary Studer link over CAT-5) or remote I/O, via MADI. The Studer can talk to the remote I/O over the MADI link, so as long as it recognises the interface, you get remote preamp operation and additional control thrown in.

If I had to list all the redundancy measures available to the Vista system, we’d be here all week, so suffice it to say: there’s lots of it – PSU, cards, cabling (and more) are all taken care of in this regard, although some of it is optional. There is ‘self-healing’ in place for the DSP cards but they can also be redundant. All faults in the system are reported to the core software, which in turn alerts the user via a system interrogation screen. Oh, and one last thing… SCore boots up in under 10 seconds.

VISTONICS

Talking to Studer’s Stefan Ledergerber, it’s clear that the Vista 5 emphasis is on ergonomics. Studer considers the DSP and the engine – the brains and guts of the system – as a ‘done deal’, meaning, at this level, customers have a right to expect more than enough power and audio quality to perform the job at hand. However, the real X factor is the ergonomics and usability of a digital console. And with that in mind, Studer has devised ‘Vistonics’.

The Studer Vistonics system is, as interfaces go, one of the best. And the accompanying pretty pictures you see here of knobs and buttons magically implanted onto touch-sensitive screens don’t do it justice – you have to actually use a Vista to fully appreciate what Vistonics has to offer.

The most obvious advantages of Vistonics are apparent when you look at the screen. There are 40 touch-sensitive knobs and 40 push-buttons, all mounted on a high-quality, touch-sensitive display. The upshot of this is that a control’s feedback is represented right where the control is – you don’t need to look at a separate screen to see the effect of your twiddling… it’s right there, in full colour. Filters and EQs are red, dynamics controls are green, pans are yellow, and auxiliaries are orange. If a low-cut is in use, you see a useful low-cut graphic; level controls grow a block of colour from the bottom; threshold controls grow a block of colour from the top, and so on.

There is a multi-functional, touch-sensitive area of the screens below the banks of knobs and buttons. For example, this area shows a graphic for each input channel’s EQ curves, dynamics curves, panning, and details of the channel labelling, ganging, and groups. If you touch one of these, the controls for that section spread across the control section above. If you touch two (not necessarily on the same channel), both sets of controls appear. This is part of Studer’s alternative to the ‘fat’ channel, or detail channel, or whatever other terminology you may be used to.

There are additional channel view buttons as well – they’re on the channel itself, labelled ‘Channel’, ‘Misc’ and ‘Bus Asn’. These also trigger exploded views on the control panel. ‘Channel’ includes most things besides EQ and dynamics (mic gain, digital trim, phase, multitrack sends, and so on); ‘Misc’ shows dynamics, EQ, and pan; and ‘Bus Assn’ shows all available buses that the channel could be routed to.

While the console has VCA-style groups, it also implements ‘ganging’, which is simply a method of grouping channels – creating a gang is as simple as holding the Control key and touching the channels. And, once ganged, it’s a case of ‘adjust one, adjust all’, including the routing additions. You can temporarily un-gang for offsetting.

Studer has achieved a simple, intuitive, and powerful interface where the rules of engagement are, almost across the board, consistent. One button press is much like another when it comes to the response of the system, and that is a good thing. The more time you’re compelled to spend thinking about how to operate your machinery, the less time you spend on being creative, and (in the case of the Vista 5’s target market) the more chance you have of not being ‘required’ for the next gig.

DIGITAL VERSATILE DESK

Of the Vista 5’s bays, the only odd one out is the Control bay. You can put it into Follow mode and use it to mirror the input faders, but it is intended as a more permanent access area for outputs. There are 12 faders here, and a full Vistonics screen.

The function of the external display is determined by access buttons for useful groups such as auxiliaries, aux outputs, groups, masters, direct outputs, bus outputs, or user-defined combinations of those. For example, once selected, meters appear beside each knob, so you can see exactly what’s occurring with the whole of the selected bus type or output range – that’s 40 meters and associated level controls at the touch of one button.

Another useful function is executed by a single button called ‘Contribution’. Here the Vistonics screen will show and allow immediate control of all the ‘contributors’ to a selected bus of the master channel you’re working on. In terms of sheer power and speed of operation, this is an extremely potent feature. If you’re working monitors and the drummer’s mix needs changing, one button – the corresponding output – is all you need to instantly access his entire mix.

Studer’s approach to button latching also demonstrates the thought that’s gone into the ergonomics. Virtually every button on the Vista follows a single, simple rule: if you touch it, it latches, if you hold it, it’s momentary – amazingly simple, yet brilliant. For example, the monitor engineer I just referred to can hold the Contribution button down, adjust anything, then let go, knowing that Vistonics will return to the pre-push state. Don’t just think of it as one less button-push, think of it as halving the total number of button pushes.

GET DOWN – SURROUND

Given surround is becoming ever more prominent in the field of broadcast, it’s not surprising that the Vista series has its own take on multichannel audio – most obviously in two areas. The first is the optional Dolby E decoder card (see box out) and, secondly, the sophisticated down mix processing block.

The actual down mix block is configured at the I/O level – with both inputs and outputs available for routing. For setup there’s a down mixer dialogue box.

One option is a straight L/R down mix, and then there is the simple ITU version (left and right rears to left and right fronts at –3dB, and centre channel to both at -3dB), although you can adjust the summing level. The latter is fine for ‘decorrelated’ surrounds, but when there’s a significant amount of correlation, the level required is closer to –6dB – but then any decorrelated aspects of the mix get lost – such as audience mics. For this, Studer offers 90-degree decorrelation of the rears.

Lastly, there’s a process that Studer calls ‘Logic 7 compatible’. In Studer’s process, the decorrelated left and right rears are panned slightly towards the centre to fill in the gap that that can often be left when the centre channel gets binned.

Hats off, then, to Studer for giving the audio engineer more input into the down mix process by offering the chance to tailor the stereo to the material and the mix style.

UNINTERRUPTED VISTAS

Other highlights? There are 32 monitoring outputs on the back of the surface, with parallel digital and analogue outs, and even a 24V power supply so you can plug your chosen master meter directly into the console. There’s an optional surround panning joystick, although surround panning in Vistonics is very good indeed. There are Isolate buttons for the snapshot system that can isolate individual blocks, whole channels, or global blocks (such as all EQs, or all dynamics etc).

I could go on. In fact, the only obvious omission from the current Vista software is DAW control. I imagine the degree to which people actually use console-based DAW control depends on how full and convenient the implementation is. That said, I’d have thought that the Vistonics interface would be ideal for this kind of control – maybe they’re working on it.

In any case, the Vista/Vistonics package is an awesome combination. Anyone with a vague notion of audio engineering could get a show going without looking at the manual – the surface positively invites you to use it. With some consoles, novelty technologies sit unloved and unused, and only come out as a party piece to impress the impressionable. Vistonics puts itself at the core of Vista operations and works beautifully.

Using the Vista 5 is addictive – once you’ve tried it, you’ll be desperate to find something else to use it on.

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