52 SPONSORED CONTENT Lawo
At every milestone in Lawo’s history, a problem has been turned into a stepping stone for something better – and the year of its 50th anniversary has been no different. In times of crises, Lawo’s pioneering spirit hasn’t failed LAWO ENGINEERS THE FUTURE
n 1970, Peter Lawo started an engineering firm in Rastatt, Germany, close to the river Rhine, specialising in building electronic
The company quickly became recognised as a pioneer in digital technology and a well-known name in high-quality audio, with a huge footprint in sports broadcasting and live production. In 1999, Philipp Lawo, son of Peter, took over as CEO and has since helped the company mature into a global player. His early vision of IP becoming a single, unified infrastructure for all types of signal transport in broadcast and media production triggered a clear corporate strategy that resulted in the IP-native focus of the company today. This includes the development and definition of RAVENNA
as an open media-over-IP standard some ten years ago. Further to this, Lawo’s belief in open industry standards and its active contribution of experience and knowledge to industry organisations has helped pave the way for wide adoption of AES67, Ember+, ST2110 and IPMX. Today, Lawo is associated with video, control and IP monitoring solutions as much as it is with audio and cutting-edge radio products. And in 2020, it has been involved in more projects than ever before, as its locked-down customers recognise the potential of open-standard IP solutions and the freedoms they afford. Below are some of the amazing solutions that the Lawo team have been able to deliver during lockdown thanks to the adoption of IP technology a decade ago – and almost all of them have been around for a while! MIX KITCHEN, REMOTE DEMOS, REMOTE TRAINING Audio engineers would argue that Lawo’s Mix Kitchen solution for its mc² ecosystem has been a highlight of the year. It transports monitoring and control data, keeping mission-critical TX audio within the facility’s infrastructure to avoid bandwidth guzzling from multichannel audio transport. It also offers comprehensive control from any place in the world using a decent internet connection. Even using a smartphone as a 4G hotspot would do the trick. When used with a laptop, Lawo’s mxGUI software (included with all mc² series
sound processors, including vocoders, halaphones and ring modulators. In 1974, Lawo produced its first analogue audio mixing console for regional public broadcaster SWR, which housed composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez in its studio. The new console included a patching matrix – a feature that has been in the broadcast world for decades, but was an astonishing innovation back then.
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