Merging Technologies Announce Winner Of Pyramix Recording Prize Draw

This year's European AES convention, held in May in Munich, saw the announcement of the winners of Merging Technologies' track playback prize draw.
As you may recall, the competition was open to anyone who could guess how many simultaneous tracks a Merging Pyramix digital audio workstation had been capable of playing back in a recent arduous real-world test at Merging's headquarters.
The test came about when Pyramix engineers wanted to stretch the new MassCore-enabled v6.1 workstation to its limits, to see just how much performance could be squeezed out of the recording platform in extreme conditions.
Before the announcement, Merging President Claude Cellier said: "The MassCore processing engine has made a huge difference to Pyramix's recording and playback track count. But we wanted to see just how much! To ascertain this, many highly edited 88.2kHz audio files, containing unrendered real-time crossfades to represent the kind of demanding audio Pyramix-based producers and engineers are used to working with, were spread across multiple tracks, with one file per track, and with the content of the project split across two solid-state playback drives. Eventually, the system could not reliably play all of the audio tracks simultaneously, but only when going over and above a very high track count. Entrants to the AES prize draw were asked to guess what this number was.
The draw was held on the Merging Technologies stand at the AES show, and most guesses ranged from three hundred to around a thousand, but only a few came close to the true figure. Kostas Glonis from Athens, Greece came third, guessing 1182 tracks and Richard Wear of recruitment company Interfacio guessed 1117, but the winning guess of 1128, which was closest to the true test figures of 1149 tracks, was from Michael Buehimann of AEU Studio Corporation in Bern, a long-time Pyramix user from Switzerland.
Richard Wear won a case of fine Swiss Fendant de St Léonard wine as the runner-up, while Michael Buehimann won the first prize, a MassCore 256+ upgrade for his new Pyramix system. He received his prize directly after the draw from Claude Cellier on the Merging stand at the AES show.
Cellier commented: "There are those who say that performance tests like this one, which are designed to produce a maximum track count for a spec sheet, are of no practical value, but because our tests at Merging reproduced real-world playback conditions - the kind that Pyramix users confront every day - we think this says a great deal about the capabilities of a MassCore-enhanced Pyramix system. Put simply, MassCore offers you a tremendous amount of processing power."
Further information is available at: www.merging.com.
(KMcA/JM)