Minnetonka Audio is now part of the Telos Alliance.
Linear Acoustic founder and Telos Alliance CTO Tim Carroll made the announcement at the IBC convention in Amsterdam. Terms were not disclosed.
Linear is part of the Telos group of companies, along with Omnia, Telos Systems/Axia and 25-Seven Systems. It makes television audio control products, while Minnetonka Audio Software makes products for motion picture, video, broadcast, game and optical disc production; its products include software kits, plug-ins and enterprise systems.
The transaction was described as a merger of audio processing entities that creates a “seamless audio content chain from creation to transmission.”
Both companies are privately held. Telos is headquartered in Cleveland and has several other offices. Minnetonka is based in Minnesota and has a subsidiary in Germany. Carroll (shown speaking in the photo at IBC) said Minnetonka’s offices, executives and staff remain in place, “and we are expanding.”
Carroll was joined in the announcement by John Schur, president of Minnetonka Audio. They said the agreement involves not only all facets of television audio but also aspects of radio, streaming and future broadcast delivery methods.
The business deal brings expertise in an area in which the Telos Alliance wants to grow, Carroll said in an email. “Traditionally, we have been more hardware-focused, but recognized a few years ago that the television and radio industries were heading rapidly towards software and cloud-based workflows,” he said. “Some time ago, we worked with Minnetonka to create a plug-in that provided NBC Olympics mixers with upmixing, downmixing and loudness control for their Avid Media Composer edit suites and Pro Tools mix rooms during the Vancouver, London and Sochi games.” He called that an example of “a perfect meshing” of Linear algorithms and Minnetonka’s software plug-in experience.
According to the announcement, current products at the combined companies include “hardware, application software, software plug-ins and widely-used licensed and OEM versions of key technologies such as loudness measurement and control, upmixing and downmixing, and Dolby and DTS encoding, decoding, and transcoding.”
According to its website, Minnetonka Audio Software started as software engineering services firm Minnetonka Software Inc. in 1986, and developed what it called the first professional-level graphical audio editing software for PC platforms. Minnetonka Audio Software Inc. incorporated in 1998 to produce professional digital audio editing products.