Pro Audio’s Next Destination is Networking and Your Store is on the Way

This October 31^st may just be another Halloween to you, but to a substantial slice of musicians out there it’s also the third day of the AES Show, the professional audio industry’s major annual conference and expo.

This year, it’s in New York City, its location every other year, as the event alternates with San Francisco and Los Angeles, where it was last year. It’s also the city that draws the largest crowd of attendees – over 18,000 the last time it was there, in 2013. It’s a show – and an industry – that’s well off its pre-9/11 highs, not unlike the music industry that it acts as the engine room for.

Pro audio – whose overall sales were up four percent last year, as per NAMM – continues its progression from complex black art into a consumerized, computerized proposition, with $99 bundles of software plug-ins replacing outboard processing boxes that used to cost thousands of dollars; the financial threshold to entry continues to fall lower and lower even as the power of the equipment continues to increase.

The newest inflection point in pro audio, one that may prove as significant as the transition from analog to digital a generation ago, is the shift to a networked environment: audio transport is moving from copper cables to hundreds of channels carried on a single strand of fiber, where the continuous flow of signal, be it analog or digital, is now a series of packets, which have to arrive at their destination with perfect synchronicity to avoid a sonic train wreck. This potentially puts everything in the music-production ecosystem, from Pro Tools to pianos, into an IT paradigm, one more akin to your laptop and router combination than the MIDI cable from the keyboard to the drum machine. It is the next stop on music technology’s developmental path that began when someone put a magnet under some guitar strings.

It’s inevitable that this new turn in pro audio’s evolutionary journey will find its way into MI retail, though it won’t be an overnight sensation. Phil Wagner, president of Focusrite Novation, which makes the RedNet series of network interfaces, told me he expects audio networking technology will start to filter down to MI products over the next 18 months, “As costs will inevitably be reduced over time, in accordance with Moore’s law,” he suggests.

The arrival of networked audio is one more reason that MI retailers need to keep pro audio high on their agendas. Musicians who today exchange Pro Tools session files with each other to collaboratively build a song track will soon be doing that in real time, over the Internet, on LANs and V-LANs that will be as simple to build as websites have become. There will be a new cohort of pro audio networking products that they’ll need to buy and need advice about. A good place for retailers to start would be learning the basics of networking and becoming familiar with Dante, the audio networking system that has garnered the overwhelming market share in the networking category. Dante is a proprietary system for networked audio for which manufacturers purchase licenses to make their products compatible with it. They blew past 200 licensees earlier this year; the brands in your store among them include Peavey, Avid, Audio-Technica, AKG, Rane, Roland, Whirlwind and a ton of stuff from Harman. You won’t be selling Dante, per se, but you’ll be selling products that enable it.

NAMM data saw the pro audio category grow by an average of 23 percent in the last five years, including four percent last year, as per NAMM statistics; it has also seen sales of software products like plug-ins and loops, the currency of digital recording, increased 29 percent in 2013 over the previous year. As music production moves into a networked environment, it’s going to need informed retail resources to support it. The networked ecosphere is headed towards becoming a truly IT world, so it will take some getting used to, but between Google and YouTube, most answers are a mouse click away. It will be a lot easier then learning what digital audio was back in 1989.