Merging Pyramix V5	SoundDevices
© Alistair McGhee	This review first appeared in the magazine of professional audio - Audio Media
	The release of Version 5 of Merging's Pyramix software provides a useful opportunity to review just how far the small Swiss company has come in the last few years. Having arrived late in a market with several strong competitors and at least one industry giant, Merging have defied gravity and expanded strongly. Their package of Pyramix software and Mykerinos (I don't think up the names, honest) hardware has been winning friends all over the audio industry and now turns up everywhere from dubbing theaters to front of house mixing desks. Although the Swiss engineers missed the start of the party in the PC DAW world, the company actually has a lengthy history in media solutions reaching back to the venerable Amiga. In some ways their recent forceful entry into the video market with the VCube system can be seen as a return to their roots, and the VCube shares the same case technology with Pyramix V5. A lot of Merging's success is undoubtedly down to the the Mykerinos PCI card which has established serious "bang for buck" DSP performance using the Philips Trimedia chip. Several neat aspects of the system have contributed to it's popularity; the option of different daughter cards offering a wide variety of I/O, the fact that multiple cards can be combined to increase DSP power and solid video support, alongside exotic features like DSD processing. In fact if you asked how can a small company get established in such a tough market then the answer is quite simple – offer better technology for less money. If you rubbed the labels from the front panels of a selection of DAWs and matched up features, power and cost, then I think you could see why so many have been swayed by Merging's solutions. The problem you'd have is that up until now Merging haven't had a front panel to call their own. Until the latest release prospective purchasers of the system have had to negotiate the choice of host pc with the dealers and systems integrators. With the release of System 5 you can now choose a Merging package that includes their own custom PC case and highly integrated system. The front panel of the Merging PC is beautifully milled from a solid block of aluminium and alongside declaiming the Pyramix logo the stunning front piece also conveys a subtler message wrought in the very metal; "Beware inside this box is big, bad f*** off DAW " - which of course is exactly the point. This new metal work is designed to dominate the bay while simultaneously reassuring clients and intimidating competitors. But the beauty is not just skin deep, round the back you'll find the timecode, word clock and sync connectors have all been case mounted, no more flying leads wobbling out behind the bay, and joy of joys the DB25 connectors are also now separately mounted in a thoroughly professional installation. Inside the box there's a mother board hiding in the corner with ample space in the neatly laid out interior for additional storage and all the Mykerinos cards you can afford. Big news in version 5 is XDTDM, that is the new eXtreme Definition Time Domain Multiplex which allows Pyramix to address 128 inputs and outputs. This should be a painless upgrade unless you have an older ADAT daughter card which currently is the only hardware unable to support the new mode. There's an apocryphal story that Claude (King of Merging), when discussing future plans in a hotel bar casually dropped into conversation "Well we could just double the bandwidth with a software patch". If the story is to be believed Claude had engineered the XDTDM capability into the hardware from day one but hadn't felt initially anyone would need 128 channels. Which just goes to show the innocence of engineers when compared to the endlessly increasing demands of the creatives. My review system came fully loaded with two Mykerinos PCI cards offering a total of 128 inputs and outputs and double the DSP grunt of a single card system. The addition of further cards will allow more DSP but not currently more I/O. Unless of course there's something else Claude isn't telling us. I've been a fan of Merging products for several years and currently use two of their systems - one as a radio editor in my pc at home and the other as a 24 track recorder installed in a Shuttle SFF PC in work. The pros are pretty clear; powerful, well engineered hardware with complete flexibility in digital I/O, and stable and sophisticated software with a comprehensive feature set. And it's cheap - honestly I know it comes from Switzerland but I'm sure a major factor in Merging's success has come from their aggressive pricing. The cons; well the box doesn't say ProTools, in the quest for the widest range of applicability some features have suffered from a comparative lack of development and it doesn't run on a Mac, oh yes and the semi-annual authorisation keys are a pain in the buss. The overall look and feel of the new V5 is a bit Macy (apologies to Mackie) with swathes of soothing grey and quaint icons that look that they've been hand drawn by designers who have a holiday in China. This is fine by me and may even appeal to those on the dark side – it's only Unix with a pretty face remember. I was working with Beta 3 and some of the features are still work in progress and bits of the interface were still awaiting a makeover. The mixer has seen a lot of work and though still not finished (but then what software is ever finished?) the progress that has already been made is very welcome. I was really pleased to see the ability to address all the channels of the mixer in one hit – so adding eq to every channel is a one step operation and by the time the release client is ready selective addressing of blocks of channels will be rolled out. Extensive menu's have been added to strips and busses allowing flexible hiding and collapsing of features you don't need to look at and colouring and labeling those you do. A small touch but it just makes using the mixer more of a pleasure. The routing has been significantly updated and the hardware is now all configurable from within Pyramix, while the mixer routing is now offered on a separate tab with a simple matrix view making mixer set up a snip. When I told a fellow Pyramix user I had version 5 his first question was - “are the VST issues with TC Powercore sorted?”, answer, yes. The VST interface has now been rewritten and has eliminated many of the problems. Surround is also being enhanced with 16 stems available and the current 5.1 being upgraded with the aim of arriving at 8.1 at release or soon after. The monitoring section is one of the areas still "under construction" but promises much. Already there are improvements to the solo function with the addition of "solo safes" and the option to denote busses as "repro" avoiding those embarrassing howlrounds that trash your new titanium tweeters and deafen the client. A new Configure tab allows channel strip and buss properties to be edited in one convenient location and all the cuts, dims and other monitoring goodies should be along for the release I think it's fair to say that everyone would welcome more on board processing options to take advantage of the systems DSP. Currently you have a motley mix of in house effects and six different versions of Vincent Burel's reverb. I think Merging could do worse than do a deal with a plug in coding house like WaveArts and bundle a whole bag of killer goodies with the system. Which is exactly what they have done in the time stretching and audio restoration fields, if you have the cash, Pyramix offers extensive audio restoration features through their relationships with Cedar and Algorithmix, and if you put your hand in your pocket you can enjoy the full power of the Cedar suite (rendered) or Algorithmix's real time de-noising and de-scratching, which I have to say I have found very cool indeed. And for time stretching the Prosoniq option has the very highest reputation. On the home front new in V5 we have an MS encoder and a new AnguDion which is pretty much an extension of the old AnguDion, memorably described in the brochure thus: "Interesting! Three buttons labeled Stooge, Angel, and Tricky, one knob calibrated from 0 - 100 You work out what it does!" Look guys if you don't know what it does don't ask us to decide, we've been on too many courses where highly paid Stooges pick over our inner turmoil, nod sagely and sa "But what does Tricky mean for you Alistair?” And as I'm not an Angel it's quite beyond me. But I digress. A welcome addition to functionality is the addition of the CD title database (FreeDB) this can save you labouring over CD track naming and makes life a whole lot easier when you want to import all the hits of Squeeze to illustrate an interview with Chris Difford. All we need now is the ability to import a section of a track rather than the whole thing and I'll be cool for cats. A few things have quietly disappeared in V5, monitor busses for one - though the functionality will be there in the new monitor page and the Cue Sequencer, which I kind of hope will return but probably has suffered to make way for the development of other aspects of the system. Good news for lovers of host based systems (always love your host I say), the native version(s) of Pyramix will also be standardised on the V5 core so most of these goodies are available to you even if you don't have the Mykarinos hardware. One thing Merging cannot be accused of is thinking small. Alongside Pyramix Merging have developed their Virtual Transport framework which is a Client/Server based interface that allows different compliant applications to both communicate with each other and to remain synced to the same timecode. The software works over a network and offers a range of applications including Sony 9 pin control, midi sync and the DSvideo player. At it's simplest VT will sync together Merging's DS video player with the audio in your timeline, on the other hand it can match video at 24 fps with audio at 25 fps without having to convert the audio and of course the media could reside on two different machines across a network. These guys want you to control the world and do it from the comfort of your computer. Why didn't I think of that? And so finally we come to DSD, I can't really review the Merging system without saying something about DSD. Merging have been at the forefront of developing DSD solutions and in version 5 you have the capability of mixing up to sixteen channels of DSD using a four Mykerinos board system. Using "pure" DSD projects Pyramix can store and replay the DSD stream but doesn't offer any level changes or processing, for that you need a DXD project. DXD describes audio in a 32bit floating point @ 352.8KHz format and allows all of the normal Pyramix editing functions and most of the native processes, a bit addition to V5 will be the Cedar options, allowing audio restoration to DXD projects and hence to the SACS production process. The output is then converted back to DSD ready for the creation of the SACD master file. Like all the big beasts of the DAW jungle Pyramix is large and complex system and when you consider the range of applications it's trying to cover that's inevitable. I can't really do it justice in a magazine article, you need to get your hands on it to see what it can do for you. It may not be a popular thing to say but you can still tell the difference between systems that offer a professional solution and those that merely aspire to do so. No names - no packdrill. I'm in no doubt that Merging offer a thoroughly pro solution and now they offer it in a really nice box with a big blue triangular on-switch. What more could you want? Well scrubbing in the cross fade editor and I think it's coming real soon.