Despite the relatively small fair, there was no lack of expert visitors. The interest in the new TRACE AES 42 for controlling digital microphones according to the AES42 standard was enormous. Presenting the system resulted in bright and surprised faces. Many visitors, not only from professional broadcast applications, wish to profit from the advantages of digital microphone techniques with their computer and plan to change or upgrade their system in the near future. The benefits realised with the TRACE AES42 by MARIAN are obvious:

• cable lengths of several hundred meters (depends on cable type and cable quality) without any loss of quality
• complete controlling of all parameters of a digital microphone like polar pattern, gain, compressor, limiter and much more
• integrated DSP for mixing and routing of all microphone signals in real-time

The second highlight, the new DSP Mixer of the PCIe series, caused considerable fascination for the visitors. 256 EQs in the hardware, 32 mixing sums – that got even sound engineering "old stagers" keen on it. Especially observed was the possibility to configure all knobs and faders of the mixer via MIDI. Thus, right at the booth, hardly anybody resisted laying hands on our example mix and spice it with the EQs of the hardware.

For MARIAN the AES was a prosperous endeavour. Numerous cordial chats with our customers were held and much positive and useful feedback from visitors could be collected. We are looking forward to the next AES!