Solid State Time Relay

Where  isolation, switching, logic functions, time delay functions and frequent on/off cycles are required along with time control a solid state relay (SSR) can be used. They are activated by a variety of AC/DC control signals from PLCs, PCs, TTLs or other microprocessor and microcontroller controls.  Absence of moving components, increase long-term reliability. They hardly wear out and there is no contact bounce due to vibration.

In a recent application we hade the chanse to use Omrons H3DS-ML. With some quite impressive specifications like 8 operating time modes, huge time range (0,1ms to 150h), high mechanical and electrical life expectancy, wide operating voltage range and DIN Track mounting (standard 17.5-mm width) is the perfect relay for the job. Low commercial price is also a plus. It's a great piece of equipment.

Multitrack Recording

Audio from conferences, meetings, presentations, lectures, training rooms, court houses, and other various venues and events have to be recorded so that after the live event is over a high quality multi channel audio record is kept. You will need to provide different audio file formats and mixes for ftp upload, web broadcasts and transcription purposes. You will also need to distribute various copies to participants, stenographers, reporters, correspondents and broadcast news analysts. You will even need to provide legal evidence.

One of our latest attempts was to provide a multitrack recording solution for a large conference venue. We used Adobe's DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software Audition CS5.5, Michael Tippach's ASIO4ALL driver and multiple ZOOM R-16 recorder interface controllers.


The Software

Using Audition CS5.5 you can record, mix, edit, and master your audio with a powerful cross-platform audio toolset. Sessions can be saved in XML format. With Real-time input monitoring you can listen selected audio inputs as you record, including effects applied to the input track. You can record, edit, and mix any number of tracks and you can sort files in the by common metadata fields such as name, media type, sample rate, and more. The powerful mixer panel proviceds flexible mixdown options and a convenient way to mix down your entire session, selected clips only, or a specified range. The only drawback is the lack of control surface support like "Mackie Control". ZOOM R-16 suports major DAW applications such as Cubase, Logic, and Sonar. Unfortunatly Adobe does not support it wet.

The Driver

ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output) is a computer sound card driver protocol for digital audio specified by Steinberg, providing a low-latency and high fidelity interface between a software application and a computer's sound card. ASIO bypasses the normal audio path from a user application so that it connects directly to the sound card hardware. It offers access to multiple audio inputs and outputs independently. Bypassing the inherently high latency, poor-quality mixing and sample rate conversion of Windows audio mixing kernels like KMixer & WASAPI, allowes direct, high speed communication with audio hardware. Bit perfect and 24-bit sample support offer higher audio fidelity and signal-to-noise ratio. Michael Tippach and his custom made ASIO driver, enables Audition DAW software to use multiple R-16's. ASIO4ALL is a universal ASIO Driver for WDM (Universal Audio Architecture) Audio.

The Recorder

ZOOM R-16 is an ideal solution that provides flexible multitracking, onboard effects, SDHC storage, easy file transfer over USB, DAW intergration using standard Mackie Control architecture and it is also portable so that it can be used for small meetings and fit in tight spaces.