...as told by Andy Calvanese, Vice President of Wheatstone in charge of Technology
I’m probably uniquely qualified in the company to tell the story, because I’ve known Gary Snow and worked with him since before there was a Wheatstone. He and I used to work together in the same company at our day jobs and in the evenings maybe we’d get together and play a little music or, from time to time, we’d make a little box of some electronic goodie for somebody, and that’s how the company got started.
This was a big year for us - it's when our vision for an Audio Ecosystem came to be - it’s when we came out with our Bridge router. We had never been in the router business before. We sort of got into it almost by accident. We had been talking with another company about integrating one of our consoles with their router to make a great package, we could sell together. We went to the NAB show that year, and lo and behold, went to their booth and they had integrated their router with somebody else’s console. So we decided, hey, we’ll make a router! And we did. That’s what we call our Bridge router these days.
Our D-8000 was unlike the control surfaces and routers these days – this was a completely integrated console that had all the audio right in it, but it was all fully digital. The neat thing about that console was that you could put processing and limiting and everything on every individual channel. It had built-in DSP for it.
We brought out radio control surfaces that work with the Bridge router. We took some of that starship technology that we had in the D-5.1, and ported it into our radio products: G-3s, G-9s, and G-8s. It took our engineering team a little while, but that system is still running in Jacksonville, they have 19 of them.
We launched our Vorsis line. Actually to great success that year, we won the Radio World cool stuff award with our AP-3. People wonder what was with Vorsis, where did that come from? It’s really a continuation of the stuff we’ve been doing all along since the very beginning. Gary Snow was one of the very first guys to ever make a parametric equalizer, in the early days, and he made electronic crossovers and compressor/limiters and all that sort of stuff from the 70s on. We had not really applied that technology very much to broadcasting because we just didn’t play in that arena. But we knew we had the experience and the understanding of how to engineer it – the AP-3 was the start of it.
That was when we introduced our first version of an AoIP driver. We showed it at the NAB show that year, interfaced with an ENCO automation system, actually streaming packets to our Bridge system through a card we had at the time we called the ET-2001. That was our first use of AoIP technology. We also introduced our Evolution Series consoles running on our Bridge TDM network. These would also run on our upcoming WheatNet-IP system.
We also released the D7, D10, and D12 TV control surfaces as well as the E6 radio control surface.