Audio Pro

Harman Pro is widely known as a one-stop-shop for the pro audio industry. With leading brands like JBL Professional, Crown Audio, AKG, Soundcraft, Studer, dbx, BBS Audio and Lexicon, under its umbrella, the company’s mission from early on has been developing dedicated brands in each market.

With that accomplished, the goal became driving value across the entire signal chain, and the most economical and sensible way of doing so is integrating strategies that fuse symbiotic relationships between the brands. Enter HiQnet, Harman’s communications protocol platform that allows all device-types in the full audio signal path to communicate with each other.

The evolution of sound control and, subsequently, HiQnet began with owner Dr Sidney Harman’s foray into the world of professional audio with the purchase of the pro and consumer divisions of JBL in the late 1960s. From then on Harman began acquiring companies with the intent of having all the parts in the signal chain. With these acquisitions came a large investment in an integrated strategy to co-ordinate activities to make a better sound system overall.

In early-2003 a cross-brand initiative was undertaken, aiming to align the mechanisms by which future products would communicate. A unifying protocol was devised by volunteers from engineering teams spread across the group and the world, deriving and marrying the best elements from existing product protocols. Another volunteer team of Harman Pro product and marketing staff began discussions with industry professionals about how they would use a single software application for the complete signal path. Interface programmers began to be recruited specifically to turn these early concepts into reality. Thus in January 2005, at the annual Harman Pro Business and Technology conference, HiQnet was born.

Fast-forward to 2008 and there is a 20-person System Development and Integration Group – a centralised Harman R&D resource based in Salt Lake City. Its mission is to develop technologies that connect and control Harman Pro Group products.

HiQnet is a language that speaks to all of the elements within a sound system’s architecture and features two major parts: the control layer and the transport layer. Within the control layer are all the elements that the user sees, the graphic user interfaces for each device and all the system-wide functionality requirements such as scheduling events, routing audio and configuring access control. The current networked-audio transport layer adopted by the HiQnet platform is Cirrus Logic’s CobraNet, which is a combination of software, hardware and network protocols created to transport uncompressed, multi-channel, low-latency digital audio over a standard Ethernet network.

HiQnet is configured and controlled by a single software application called HiQnet System Architect. Now on version 1.7, System Architect has a software architecture which enables the Harman Pro brands to create plug-ins for their products. The plug-ins are integrated seamlessly into the core System Architect application and together they enable the system designer to configure and control HiQnet products.

Although CobraNet is the current networked audio transport of choice for Harman Pro, Harman’s developers are contributing to an Ethernet innovation: a standards-compliant, low-latency, low bandwidth audio and video capable network technology.

Michael MacDonald, executive vice president of marketing and salesfor Harman Pro Group, explains: “One of the major holdbacks with CobraNet not becoming a standard, or even being universally used is due to its high cost per node. High cost per node is driven by the fact that it has low volumes; low volumes are driven by the fact that our industry has made the choice to take on a non-standard product, so we are not using all the regular parts – and that drives up the product, network administration and network infrastructure costs. That said, because it is the dominant technology in our market we are naturally committed to supporting CobraNet for the foreseeable future.

“Because networking is high-cost, manufacturers always make it optional. Harman is working towards the point that every product we make above $400-$500 will have HiQnet capability in some way.”

The initial goal was to integrate HiQnet in every one of Harman’s products, the company now has the greater goal of incorporating a next generation audio transport – intended to change the way in which we think about Ethernet and media streaming. This is spearheaded by its involvement in the IEEE 802.1, Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) Task Group, a collective of Ethernet silicon manufacturers, network infrastructure, and prestigious professional and consumer companies.

“The best part is that this is going to be an open standard that other companies can get into. They can look into 802.1 and find that there are a lot of major semiconductor manufacturers and big consumer companies that are looking into it,” explains MacDonald.

“If the semiconductor companies take it to the foundry and begin making chipsets for consumer companies, the fact that they are in meetings with big consumer companies and are interested in the economic potential of it means that the volumes will soon be there to make a consumer level price. On the basis that there are parts in the market that anyone can buy means that anybody can look at this downstream and embed them into their products.

“The good news is that, since the transport layers will be standard, we can get the trains on the tracks and pull the trains off the tracks. Because it is Ethernet, companies can run their control software at the same time we are running ours. It will just be another application like running MS Excel and MS Word, and you can toggle between them; users can then have a window with all the HiQnet applications and another with the product software.”

Because the industry is becoming fractured by so many competing audio network protocols, Harman’s involvement in the IEEE 802.1, Audio/Video Bridging Task Group is partly fuelled by its desire for the industry to adopt an open universal audio/video network platform.

“From working with Yamaha, TimeLine and Harman and my consultant work with a host of other manufacturers and end-users over the last 15 years, I am absolutely opposed to creating an insular world where we build a giant wall around ourselves and keep everyone out. Economically it doesn’t work, and our customers expect us to be part of that world,” MacDonald comments.

“We need to have a good strategy on how the system is architected so that we have features and benefits and ease of use that are above our competitors, but I would love to see other people join in the IEEE 802.1 standard to get a broader user base going because it will only serve to make the parts cheaper for everyone.”

While there are new developers popping up in the industry – seemingly every other month – who are proposing their own proprietary network solutions, MacDonald sees a major problem that these companies will eventually face: to create a sustainable system effectively, they need a major network silicon manufacturer behind them.

“There are a lot of bit-players coming into the marketplace attempting to solve the problems associated with streaming audio and video data across a network. Having to sit on top of and work with existing Ethernet though, they struggle to deal with latency, clock issues, and sample rates. They are very smart people and they have great ideas, but, unless they can pull in a Ethernet silicon giant they fundamentally can’t change Ethernet to fit their streaming media needs – but the IEEE can. They are also going to have an economically difficult time because they are looking at a 10 to 12 million dollar investment to take something from design into a production part.

“To recover that investment they have to sell hundreds of thousands of units a month. There is no one in the pro audio business, that I can imagine, who would want to make that kind of investment because the pay off would take 100 years. The challenge of that is to spend 10 million dollars today and in two or three years that investment is completely gone and you have to do it again, so you have to recover 10 million and make a margin and recover all of that profit in 36 months.”

As such, Harman has made the investment and is able to integrate that expense into each one of its products that features HiQnet capabilities. This is a model that smaller companies can’t afford.

As for the current state of affairs, the HiQnet development team has a bidirectional relationship with the Harman Pro companies. Rick Kreifeldt, vice president of Harman Pro System Development and Integration Group, explains: “We are just the glue. The brand experts focus on what they do really well and we have a collaborative strategy that pulls it all together without people losing their expertise. This structure enables all the innovative ideas and solutions developed by each brand to gather under one umbrella for incorporation into the shared HiQnet system.

“With constant testing and developments by each brand, the future of HiQnet will see system-level control getting simpler as time goes on. By adding high-level features and more automation, we make people’s everyday jobs easier.”
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