The Power of Three: Axia celebrates its 3rd birthday

It's been two years since we last chatted with Axia President Michael “Catfish” Dosch. A lot has happened since then, and we figured it was time to catch up.

Mike, it seems IP-Audio has really taken off in the last few years, with articles in the broadcast press, discussion on the engineering newsgroups, et cetera. Has IP-Audio become mainstream technology for broadcasters?

It sure does seem so. When we first launched Axia, we did a lot of educating. We described—to polite but often-skeptical engineers—our vision of a future in which everything in the broadcast plant will be networked together via Ethernet.

The industry’s tech side has changed a lot since then. Mostly because of HD implementation, satellite distribution, and real-time Internet streaming, engineers have become much more comfortable with packets. There have been noticeable changes in studio infrastructure building methods. And there are a growing number of companies whose gear connects directly to Axia networks using IP-Audio standards. All this combined has created a groundswell of interest and activity.

Even our competitors who once insisted that IP-Audio “would never work!” are now reluctantly admitting that they will need to offer some kind of IP-Audio solution, so it’s pretty clear that IP-Audio is now part of the mainstream, and Axia has been at the center of it all.

Are you saying that your competitors have stopped badmouthing Axia?

Well, no. We still hear about negative campaigning from the other console companies. Now, though, broadcasters are more educated and so are less inclined to believe the negative claims. Indeed, many broadcasters will argue the benefits of the IP-Audio approach and in particular the merits of Axia products. I think it is a healthy debate actually: IP-Audio technology versus the status quo. And with so many broadcasters gaining interest and joining the debate, we will all learn together.

Some of your competitors say that using off-the-shelf Ethernet switches is a bad idea for broadcasting. They claim that a closed, proprietary system is more reliable.

What else would you expect them to say? But this defies common sense! Axia is a division of Telos, and Telos would never risk its reputation by offering unreliable tech to broadcasters. And our clients are really quite pleased; just ask them.

So why is Ethernet better than proprietary tech?

It isn’t just Ethernet; Axia systems are built around Cisco Ethernet switches. Cisco builds the most reliable and feature-rich Ethernet switches we have tested, and their service and support are legendary.

(Ethernet switching info links for further reading – Ed.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet  http://computer.howstuffworks.com/ethernet14.htm 

You see, switched Ethernet technology was developed for Voice-over-IP phone systems. I’m not talking about “voice over the Internet”; I’m talking about the VoIP networks which have replaced PBX systems in the majority of Fortune 500 companies. The tech in these switches delivers reliable, low-latency telephone communication for huge companies, and we realized that the same tech could be applied to real-time audio routing for broadcasting.

Axia’s competitors claim that Cisco doesn’t understand what it’s like to build high-reliability products for broadcast, but Cisco switches are used by hospitals, banks, stock exchanges, airlines… all 24/7 applications that need bulletproof reliability. There are many options for redundancy and backup, and Cisco reliability has been proven over many years in some of the most hostile environments you can imagine.

A few broadcasters have actually told me they’re more comfortable buying a product built using proprietary technology from a broadcast-only company. But I have a hard time believing that any company with half-a-dozen engineers, no matter how brilliant, can build products as reliable as Cisco — they’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D into this tech! So instead of reinventing the wheel and building our own switch, we decided to let the best networking company in the world build the switches, so we could focus on adapting that technology to the needs of broadcast.

Enough about the competition. It seems there’s a lot broadcast equipment makers who like the Livewire networked approach, yes?

Right. We have a growing list of partners, a combination of software and hardware providers. Some, like Prophet, Google/dMarc, BSI and D.A.V.I.D. (to name a few) provide radio station delivery and audio production systems; our partnership allows their products to integrate with Axia networks and save clients on hardware costs. Besides connecting audio to the network, they can interact with the on/off buttons and text displays on our consoles. Audio and logic integration is all on a single Ethernet cable.

We also have a number of hardware partners, like AudioScience, IDC and 25/Seven. These companies are building products with Livewire connectors that hook right into our network without having to go through intermediate analog or AES audio connections.

For example, the 25/Seven guys have a very popular, award-winning product called Audio Time Manager. This product can now connect to your Axia network, and become a shared resource that can be used throughout the facility instead of being dedicated to one studio.

More examples: the International Datacasting Superflex satellite decoder, and Radio Systems’ Digital Millenium console, both of which use Livewire to connect to the Axia network. So you could actually have an Axia routing system with Radio Systems consoles. Or you could mix and match – use the Millenium in some rooms and the high-end Axia consoles in other rooms.

AudioScience is the latest Axia hardware partner, right?

AudioScience is the best there is in the computer soundcard business. So when they said they wanted to make a Livewire sound card, we were delighted! Now, computer audio apps that already use AudioScience sound cards can use this ASI Livewire card. Like our Audio Driver, the I/O and logic are connected directly to the Axia network, but it also has onboard DSP resources and can perform many of the same high-end DSP functions that the other AudioScience cards can, like MPEG encoding and decoding, and pitch-corrected stretch and squeeze, all in real time. Axia users can now take advantage of these high-end features and still connect directly to the Livewire network. It’s the best of both worlds!

But I thought one of Axia’s main selling points was getting rid of sound cards?

Not exactly. It’s not the card itself that’s so pricey; it’s the hardware that you must plug that sound card into, like console line input modules and router input cards.

We make an IP-Audio Driver that allows audio applications to pass audio to and from the Axia network without a sound card by packetizing audio and sending it through the computer’s Ethernet NIC. Sure, you eliminate the cost of the sound cards but more importantly, you eliminate the cost of the hardware the sound cards normally plug into. And the cost of connecting a PC to your audio network becomes quite a bit cheaper than a sound card into a router input; it’s just the cost of an Ethernet port, and most installations generally have some unused ports ready for use.

I’ve heard that Telos and Omnia are putting Livewire ports on their new products, too.

Of course! Telos just introduced the Nx12, a phone system with 4 hybrids that integrates seamlessly with Axia consoles, and carries all its audio, phone signaling and switching, mix-minus and hybrid control over the same Ethernet cable. Zephyr Xstream ISDN codecs now come with Livewire, and there’s a new Zephyr called iPort that’s an MPEG gateway — put one on each end of an IP link with QoS, and you can connect Axia facilities in different cities with eight bi-directional stereo audio links.

There are two new Omnia audio processors with Livewire, too. The first is Omnia ONE, which is a very powerful processor that can be used for FM, HD Multicast, DAB, etc., and along with conventional I/O, it has a Livewire port that lets you connect its audio and remote control to the Axia network with one Ethernet cable. Imagine a networked audio processor that lets you switch airchains or program feeds with the click of a mouse!

The second is Omnia.8X, and it has eight three-band audio processors in one box. With that much processing power on hand, you can use it for headphone processing, phone codec sweetening, or on-demand for in-studio performances and such. Our clients are very inventive; I’m sure they’ll come up with a lot more uses we haven’t even thought of.

You’ve been running an ad that says there are now over 500 Axia studios. Some folks find that hard to believe! Seems like a big number for such a young company.

It’s actually more than 600 as of the date of this interview. You’re right, it is a lot for a company that’s just a few years old. We’ve been growing quickly and adding staff — engineers, production people, marketing, sales, applications engineers, developers, software engineers, support personnel.

We’ve got new sellers with years of console experience — you know, we actually hired Jim Armstrong and Mike Uhl, who used to work for SAS, Klotz and PR&E! We now have a large team of Axia support and application engineers and we’re planning further expansion this year. We’ve got some real heavy hitters who are able to help our customers explore Axia applications, consoles and routers in particular.

Plus, we’ve got Marty Sacks, who’s returned to the company as the VP of Axia. Marty is such a personable guy, with such a talent for communicating with customers, that he’s really been able to help grow the business while super-serving every one of our clients. This also gives me more time to concentrate on developing new products. We are having a great time!

So what’s with those other wild ads you’ve been running? The ones with about 50 million words?

That wordy ad campaign was the brainchild of Clark Novak, Axia’s Marketer. He’s got this skewed sense of humor, but we really love him and our clients do too. Of course, I have to say nice things about Clark or he’ll Photoshop something awful onto my publicity photo… again.

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