Illustration showing Merlin Plus at the studio connecting up to six bidirectional mono remotes simultaneously
Tieline is highlighting its Merlin Plus here in Vegas.
Said to be particularly useful to powers users at sports and news/talk stations that do a lot of remotes, the codec can create and manage up to six independent bidirectional mono connections with IP codecs or smartphones using Tieline’s Report-IT product. It can also provide high-fidelity, bidirectional stereo IP audio and full-duplex communications from the studio to a remote codec.
It occupies 1RU, and codec configurations can be recalled via “programs.” Features include dual
Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual redundant power supplies and IP network backup, as well as SmartStream Plus redundant IP streaming.
Merlin supports both IPv4 and IPv6 (Dual Stack) protocols. Users also can connect over IP with any SIP-enabled IP codec brand supporting the EBU N/ACIP tech 3326 standard. It is also compliant with I3P EBU3347 requirements for interoperability of AoIP production intercoms.
The codec includes the low delay and cascade-resilient E-apt-X algorithm, as well as LC-AAC, HE-AAC, variable bit-rate Opus, MPEG Layer II, MP3, Tieline Music and MusicPLUS, G.722 and G.711 algorithms. Asymmetric encoding and decoding allows high-quality audio in one direction low-bandwidth program on the return.
