Calrec Audio has unveiled a brand-new audio mixing system designed to keep pace with the changes broadcasters are experiencing in their production workflows. Designed to adapt to changing production needs, Calrec’s Argo is a new approach to audio mixing, with a flexible control philosophy that breaks the traditional geographic tie lines between processing and control.
   

Argo is fully modular with interchangeable hardware panels and uses Calrec’s time-served Assist UI at its core. This means that whether you are working on physical hardware panels or on a remote GUI, the user interface is both familiar and easy to drive. It’s modular panel system encourages broadcasters to adapt surface hardware to meet their unique requirements, with two mid-level rows of interchangeable panels on the larger Argo Q model, and one mid-level row on the compact Argo S model. Calrec has also introduced a comprehensive system of user templates to instantly change the hardware user interface to meet changing requirements or user preferences.

This is built around an expanded version of Calrec’s popular ImPulse IP core. ImPulse can also be located anywhere; the location of the control surface is not tied to the processing core. It can power up to four independent mix environments, including headless mixers accessed on the public internet, with each mixer able to access more than 2,350 processing paths on a single console; this provides enough power to deal with the biggest immersive and NGA mixing demands.

The physical control surface is also more streamlined, using optically bonded touchscreens to provide unrivalled visual feedback and speed of access. Soft panels provide a richer user experience and hardware panels allow users to build definable functions and apply these as templates - this helps operators move around the surface faster and makes it more intuitive.

Argo’s panels are also interchangeable and can be placed wherever they are needed. This makes it easy to grow and adapt the console to individual requirements and it means the desk can easily be split for sub mixing or mixing in other locations.

Like all Calrec consoles, Argo builds on Calrec’s broadcast-specific and industry-leading surface redundancy. All control elements can be duplicated so an operator can use any panel to access inputs and controls. When combined with redundant hardware as standard, Argo provides SMTPE’s hitless packet merging alongside a second layer of hardware redundancy to guarantee broadcast uptime.

Optional AoIP IO modules are available - which can be fitted directly into the control surface, with a variety of I/O options. These can be fitted into every section of the console to give the operator a variety of input options, make cabling more efficient and save space in external racking.