Avid Technology : What’s New in VENUE 5.3 Software for S6L

MADI-192 MADI Option Card

VENUE 5.3 also supports the new MADI-192 option card, which provides 64 inputs and 64 outputs per card at 96 kHz. You can have up to four MADI-192 cards installed in an E6L engine simultaneously, which would give you up to 256 channels over the MADI format. This is exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, just the ability to interface with other MADI-enabled devices is huge. We've provided customers with a MADI split via the Stage 64 I/O box since the beginning, allowing you to feed other consoles, broadcast locations, etc. directly from the preamps. But now with the MADI-192 option card, we can now deliver high channel count connectivity with other MADI-enabled devices, letting you route any signals to and from the system.

We can also use MADI as the front end for our Virtual Soundcheck workflows to interface with recording devices, similar to how we handle it over the Ethernet AVB network, only using MADI as the interface. As I already covered, VENUE 5.3 ups the Pro Tools recording and playback over Ethernet AVB to 128 channels, which is a very simple, no-fuss solution for Virtual Soundcheck. However, what MADI-192 cards allows us to do is just have a higher channel counts than 128-to a maximum configuration of 256 channels of record and playback if we have four cards installed. Since S6L supports up to 192 inputs on stage, using MADI enables us to capture all of those inputs. And this Virtual Soundcheck over MADI still provides you with all the unique VENUE advantages when used with Pro Tools, including per channel Virtual Soundcheck (the ability to just choose which channel is) and VENUELink which automatically configures your session files within Pro Tools (with automatic patching, naming, and interfacing between Pro Tools and VENUE console).