Audiologic – The Logical Choice for Audio Solutions
Founded in 2004, the Audiologic story began when Simon Stoll and Matt Boland spotted a great gap in the market. No one else was offering a specialist service for pro AV and installation contractors. Audiologic has since become one of the UK’s leading AV distributors. Headed up by managing director Andy Lewis, the company’s mission is simple – to provide empowering, unifying, and inspiring AV solutions via integrators for all types of customer – ranging from corporate spaces to universities, theatres and bars to schools, government buildings and retail spaces. Central to this is a dedicated team, united by a passion to provide the best customer service and experience in the industry.
More than 15 years on, Audiologic has achieved widespread recognition as an award-winning provider of high-quality AV solutions across the UK, delivering a raft of unrivalled product support services to installers and integrators.
Strategy
The company-wide focus is on tailoring the best possible solution that will always exceed expectations, something Audiologic is well positioned to achieve with its commitment to innovation, operational excellence and in-depth product and market knowledge.
With proven results and full access to a wide and growing portfolio of more than 40 highly respected international brands, the company is able to make a meaningful difference and drive innovation on every level; enhancing the customer experience, ensuring the future needs of the business are taken care of, driving the outcome beyond initial expectation, and ensuring ongoing operation and maintenance is easy and straightforward.
Growing the portfolio and reaching new markets
Evidence of Audiologic’s motivation to offer the best customer service can be seen with the continued expansion of its product and service portfolio. Andy Lewis tells us more: “For Audiologic, it is about finding the right product and brand to do the right job in the right place, exploring how the team can tailor those products together to provide the best fit. We then simply wrap the right service around it to deliver a superb experience to our customer.”
A recent example of this comes with a new distribution agreement with DiGiCo. DiGiCo is a UK-based manufacturer of some of the world’s most successful and ground-breaking digital mixing consoles The company hand-picked Audiologic for its wealth of first-hand experience and expertise in the installed sound market, where a fully integrated solution is often both critical and complex in equal measure.
For Audiologic, DiGiCo’s 4REA4 digital processing engine puts high quality audio at the heart of a permanent sound solution, with a vast processing resource and redundancy support not normally found in this price category. The ability to integrate with top tier, permanently installed products natively, without complex programming, enhances the flexibility of this solution making it suitable in the wider AV market.
There are four built-in DiGiCo Multimedia Interface (DMI) slots and a current range of 11 compatible card types/protocols to choose from. These four DMI cards slots, paired with the 4REA4’s additional ‘tie lines’ routing system, allow for the easy format conversion between any of the four DMI card protocols without using up any onboard processing resources.
Dante IP connectivity adds flexibility and familiarity. This means that facilities with an existing network infrastructure can place I/O for their 4REA4 anywhere on their network. The new DMI Dante 64@96 card with Sample Rate Conversion allows 4REA4 to take advantage of existing legacy 48K Dante networks and I/O devices, allowing the addition of DiGiCo’s renowned audio quality to bring new life to an existing installation.
Ben Spurgeon, Senior Applications Manager at Audiologic is hugely enthusiastic: “The DiGiCo 4REA4 is a truly unique product offering for the world of installed AV. A brainchild from the live sector, the processor perfectly caters for multi-use spaces in a way that no other product can. With a 96kHz sample rate and an incredibly intuitive GUI, quality is at the heart of the processor.”
We go on to ask Ben some further questions…
How does the addition of 4REA4 complement your existing brands?
The 4REA4 is the perfect joint venture for both the live and installation worlds. A lot of existing processors offer mixer integration via either analogue or networked inputs, whereas the 4REA4 is designed for fully combining live and install spaces with mixing console integration. There is not another product out there that offers the same feature set of this product, it really does sit in a world of its own.
What are the specific benefits for your house of worship customers?
The uptake of live music within houses of worship has been incredible and it is now a baseline requirement for most venues. For the AV (or PA) system, this requires huge amounts of flexibility to be able to cover both services and live music. Often, we see that the in-house system will also be supplemented by a live system and the two used independently. Not only can this cost more, but it also means the users have to learn to operate two separate systems. Implementing a sound system and back-end processing that can look after both scenarios simplifies everything. Services can be near fully automated with very little user input and yet when live music is required, a simple pre-set can be recalled providing full control via a DiGiCo mixing console, still utilising the same system.
What are the specific benefits for your customers in the Education sector?
A similar scenario rings true for the education sector, specifically lecture theatres and multiuse spaces. The flexibility requirement for lecture theatres these days can be expansive and the 4REA4 can easily adapt to allow for this. Built for up to four areas, the product also is not just for a single space. Having up to four assignable areas allows for multiple multipurpose management, all from a single processor.
What are the specific benefits for your customers in the Corporate sector?
Multi-purpose auditoriums are now used for a multitude of events within the corporate world, hosting launch events, company meetings and all sorts of company-wide entertainment. On a day-to-day basis, these spaces may just need background music, if they are operating as a canteen or social space for example. Should a need arise for an event, a mixing console can simply be deployed to allow for anything up to a large-scale production.
How will you demonstrate its capabilities in practice?
With a sample rate of 96kHz, the processor also has superior audio quality to other available DSPs. Coming from the live market, this increased sample rate was key to keeping the high quality of live performance. The 96kHz also still allows for masses of networked audio channels, reaching an impressive 512 I/O count. Due to its semi-fixed architecture design, the programming and commissioning time is also greatly reduced and very easy to learn. The simple to use GUI will be familiar feeling to any programmer/engineer to allow for rapid deployments of even the larger sized systems.
Priorities
In a world that is changing rapidly, the Audiologic team and its culture is what makes the company special. They are growing their talent at all levels, building critical capabilities, and strengthening functional excellence. An experienced team of application engineers design and build comprehensive solutions starting from the initial project plan and ending with the always-there, always-ready support. Learnings are enthusiastically shared with an education and training facility at the Harlow headquarters which allows customers to visit and witness product demonstrations, receive hands on training and the opportunity to work closely with the Audiologic team on project planning and product selection. This process is a key priority as part of their continuing desire to become a central knowledge hub for the industry.
As an example, Audiologic has been active during lockdown in providing a series of free webinars on ‘Audio Fundamentals’ (in partnership with QSC) for those keen to brush up on their understanding of the basics of audio.
Future
Audiologic remains agile and adaptive to the needs of the market in these uncertain times. Developments in AV will continue to change the foundational elements in the wider environment in new and unforeseen ways. It will continue to listen closely to its customers, invest in the team, expand the product offering and service delivery, whilst working closely in partnership with key manufacturers to continue to deliver the very best customer experience available
