The Whole Origin Story of Audio Over IP - Greg Shay, CTO Telos Alliance

It is not that often that your inner monologue, history as you remember it, is of interest to others. On this occasion of being awarded a technical Emmy by the television industry for the Development of Synchronized Multi-channel Uncompressed Audio Transport Over IP Networks, I wanted to share the story, the whole story from my point of view, of how this came to be at Telos Alliance.

Any story worth reading is worth telling well, so please forgive my somewhat loose writing style and enjoy the ride, as I have over these 24 years.

So, kiddies, set your PTP way-back machine to 1996. (Oh wait..., that was before PTP was invented....!)

This original article has been translated from Italian.

During this particular period in time, the youth are using their creativity and energy to find solutions that allow radio to serve its audience even better. 19-year-old Timo Piredda, a very young and talented presenter on Radio MFY, has created a special format to entertain people during the quarantine, with the help of Axia from Telos Alliance.

Timo Piredda at Radio MFY with Axia

Meet Marc Bakos. He's the man behind a recent update at kmfm (located in Kent, in South East England UK) to the newest audio processing solution from Telos Alliance, Omnia Enterprise 9s High Density Virtual Audio Processing Software. We chat with him about how the software is working out for him and more

As broadcasters, we have to come up with creative ways to stay on the air, no matter what. Up until recently, that has meant hardware redundancy, which is costly and, unfortunately, not always the most flexible. We designed Omnia Enterprise 9s especially for broadcasters who need maximum flexibility to move their entire processing infrastructure as needed and to be able to access it from a variety of locations. 9s is a high-density audio processing solution that is designed for use in HA (high availability) situations. 

Broadcasters are pushing their remote control capabilities to new heights as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt normal operations. While at first, the effects were as small as the reduction of staff and closing of individual studios for cleaning, currently, entire studio facilities are shutting down with all staff told to work remotely whenever possible.

Those who have made the partial or full transition to a modern Audio over IP studio infrastructure are particularly well-positioned to handle the rapid onset of the virus-related staffing restrictions. Many engineers have found that the remote control features they already use for troubleshooting are highly extensible and can be slightly modified for use by production staff.

Solving problems is one of the key reasons most of us are in the radio engineering business. What a time we are in; the focus on engineering has never been keener. Nor have there been as many problems to solve! One of our Telos/Axia installation contractors, Gregory Dahl of Second Opinion Communications, offered some thoughts for AoIP broadcasters during this unusual time.

A television engineer once told me that he’d been in the industry long enough to remember when audio was the simple part of TV: “If you turned up the volume and heard sound, you were all set.” The transition to DTV changed all of that as broadcasters wrapped their heads around multichannel audio as well as loudness and compliance issues, and now the emergence of immersive audio and the deployment of ATSC 3.0 has introduced an entirely new television audio lexicon. We thought it might be time to help untangle the ball of TV audio twine.

In these turbulent times, keeping the FM airwaves free of offensive material is more important than ever before. Media Max, one of Kenya’s largest broadcast networks needed a robust, networkable profanity-delay solution to keep the content on their six radio stations free of questionable or profane content.

2019 left just as quickly as it arrived, and suddenly we begin 2020 as inspired and motivated as ever, looking forward to what 2020 has in store for us and our customers. As part of our year-end series of blogs, we put together a list of our most popular social media posts from 2019 to bring us into the new year. Here's to an exciting 2020 and to creating the future of audio together!