Audiologic Presents: Lifting the Lid on LEA Professional (webinar)
Afternoon, guys. Thank you for joining on this fairly sunny random afternoon in the in the UK today. We're going to be presenting a webinar called lifting the lid on Lea professional with myself, Ben from Audiologic, one of my colleagues, Jeff from L EA. Yeah. So just a quick bit of housekeeping before we get started. We're going to run through the presentation to fairly fixed format, but anyone that has any questions, please do drop in the Q& A and we'll have a dedicated section at the end of the presentation to answer any questions you might have.
The questions are moderated just in case you want to get creative in there and the webinar is being recorded so anyone that can't make it or if you need to duck out, we will also be sending a recording of this via e-mail post presentation, OK. Great. Let's take a look about what we're going to be covering in the next 30 minutes.
First off, I can see a couple of familiar faces and names in the in the lobby, but some of you might be new to us, so I'm going to do a quick introduction into who audiologica Jeff will then be running a quick intro into Ellie a professional and. A little bit about the brand and then I'm going to cover some core technologies and the fundamentals of alier. We'll then take a look at the hardware, go through the range, see some of the features, and then I'll give a quick opinion on why we're so fond of these amplifiers. And then we'll get into the questions from you guys.
So quickly, just for anyone that doesn't know who I am, I'm Ben Spurgeon. I'm the head of technical here at Audiologic. Hi, I'm Jeff Gorton. I know many of you from past exploits.
I've been in the industry over 20 years. I started as an installer and AV Commissioner in the installation company. Great. Thanks Sophie.
I haven't been in the industry 20 years. I'm I've got some catching up to do to. So just quickly, who are audiologic? We are the UK based distributor exclusively for Lea as well as lots of other key professional audio brands in house. We have a lot of absolute audio nuts. We're all, you know, sound engineers, system designers, everything like that.
We're very much passionate about the the audio experience that we can create and alongside distribution, we also take care of everything. All the way from presale system design all the way through to commissioning. So we do much more of the technical aspects of it's not typically always included in distribution. So we we're always here to help our partners along the range. We've been exclusive with Lea for just over three years now. It's a brilliant, brilliant product that we're really enjoying growing into the UK market. And yeah,
we're going to cover a bit more about that today. So a little bit of background about L EA and where we've come from in the centre of the picture with the checkered shirt is a chap called Blake Asberger who some of you may know. He was the former CEO of Crown amplifiers when crown was acquired by Har. He then became the CEO of Harmon. He was from Harmon back in 2017,
went out and bought himself a lovely yacht and was fishing off the back of the Florida crease whilst he was out there he received an e-mail saying the Crown manufacturing plant. Deanna was being disbanded and 700 people were being made redundant. This obviously upsetting because he knew and worked with a lot of these guys and he also knew the amount of talent and engineering talent there was there.
So he started writing a business case, and he's both at the time, was called loud enough. So this is where the name comes from. He named the company loud enough.
Audio or Lea that you've got there whilst he's writing the business case? He's a shark, swam across the back of the boat. And he thought to himself, what a perfect logo that's going to be the logo for my new business, and it saved himself for hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing. Also, as in the picture or to his left is Scott Robinson, former VP of Sales for Harmon, now VP of Sales for L EA, and our marketing director. Is guessed it, VP of Sales for Harman, now the VP of Sales for L EA. Next slide, please, Ben.
Yeah, 'cause it. Thank you. So where does le a fit and the type of markets it fits into? So imagine a lot of you are know a lot of you are working in the corporate market and quite a few of you are working in the higher education and education sectors. The benefit of using Lea will allow you to get into other expanded business related into other market sectors. As you can see on the screen here.
So for example, Lea is the standard and specification on all MSC Cruise Yachts. We also do a lot of super yachts. We're heavily involved in the hotel and hospitality arenas. We do.
A lot of work with museums. We do huge amounts with stadiums and we also have a specific line for cinema in the cinema series. Great. Thanks Jeff.
Right. Let's take a look at the few core technologies or the pillars of LA that make these amplifiers stand out from the rest of the crowd. Obviously, when we talk about amplifiers, we're talking about power delivery here and lots of power all delivered from a single chassis. Amplifiers are designed for this, and thankfully the developments we've seen over the recent years is allowing more and more power into ever increasingly small units. Which means it's great for saving rack and also giving us more easy power delivery out to large scale speaker systems. As well as this will seem really clever developments in how we're delivering that power.
Or maybe even sharing it across the rest of the amplifier. So the majority of the range are now based in a single one RU chassis. We do have some above and some below which you will see a little bit later, but even in the single one RU chassis. We've got low impedance or high impedance per channel and something that's fairly unique to you. L EA is the smart power bridge. Typically, when you bridge an amplifier channel,
you get double the power, but that usually means you're losing that second channel. So a four channel amplifier suddenly goes down to three channels, which isn't always all that useful with L EA Smart Power Bridge. What we can do is double the power of any single channel, and it doesn't sacrifice the power available elsewhere or any other channel. So take a four channel thousand Watt amplifier. If we were to enable smart Power Bridge on Channel 3. We got to 2000 watts available on that Channel, whilst unaffecting the other three channels still with full thousand Watt power delivery. This is really, really useful when you're doing things
that include subwoofers, where typically we buy separate amplifiers, we can scale up and use more power we. Don't need to do that anymore. We can just use smart Power bridge, dedicate a single channel to the Subs and suddenly you've got everything you need inside a single amplifier. On board the amps we've also got some incredibly intelligent DSP, so everything's built on a 96 kilohertz platform.
So it's an absolutely great sounding amplifier. We've also got an entire library of speaker tunings, meaning that you don't have to go through and manually calibrate all your speakers. Additional tuning is always a good idea in my books, but it means as soon as you rock up on site you can just go through your driver library, pick which speakers you're running with on site, and get everything sounding as great as possible within just a matter of. Minutes. On top of that, we also have the ability to do F IR filters on some of the larger amplifiers or the advanced DSP versions for meaning when you really need to get down into the nitty gritty and really tune those high end systems. Got that available to hand.
In terms of the brains behind the solution, all of these amplifiers are built with it in mind. So I'm going to show you a few features that we've incorporated with this shortly, but everything's comes from an incredibly smart background and a smart brain inside the amplifiers essentially, which allows us to do some really cool things. And some very clever pieces of software. So let's get started with connecting to the amplifier. The 1st and simplest method to do this is the web UI.
This takes away the requirements for any dedicated software or any complex connection procedures. All we have to do is head to the IP address of the amplifier and we get the full control interface. As long side the monitoring so we can configure the amp in a matter of seconds.
The nice thing about this is it means device agnostic. So I've done it before where I've commissioned one of these amps on my phone. Or you can use a MacBook or Windows device. All very easy.
Next up, we've got the Lea cloud. This is the Amazon AWS Cloud based system that's all back ended and included free of charge with the amplifiers which gives us global remote monitoring and control of the amplifiers at 0 cost. All we need to do is provide an Internet connection into the back of the AM. And suddenly we've got global visibility across all of our sites, all of our amplifiers even down to the load monitoring and input monitoring. So we've got great global visibility. This is one of my personal favorite features.
The cloud is what really separates this apart, and especially when we're a world of licensing and additional costs. At the moment this is something that sets these amplifiers apart and isn't even being charged for, so it's such a great selling point to end users. Also great from a technical perspective in terms of supporting sites. And finally, in terms of software, we've got the ever returning shark Fin logo which you'll see popping up. We've now got this sharkware application.
This is when you're deploying multiple amplifiers or you want to do offline designs ahead of getting to site. This allows you to do your full configuration. You can then just rock up on site and push your designs over the network to all of your online amplifiers.
Charco makes it incredibly easy. It's incredibly intuitive and just makes those deployments even faster and simpler. OK. So we'll go on to a little bit of an overview of the range of the connected series amplifiers.
We can move on to the next slide for me, Ben. Around when Blake started putting together the business, he went to his engineers and said where you restricted in your previous company. I want you to use those huge brains of yours and all that experience to design the best possible amplifiers you can and you have complete freedom to. Do that and when you come up with a great idea, there are awards for doing so. Including if you look at the PCB boards we have shark logos for each of the engineers. That's done design on that board, but in the heart of it.
L EA makes extremely good and brilliant sounding amplifiers. Next slide please, Ben. And having worked for many manufacturers in the past, I know how complex some of the model numbers can be. This company works perfectly for me because it's very easy to help and specify each of the different models.
The first number, if we look to the top is the CONNECT 34. This denotes that the amplifier is a 30 Watt 4 channel amplifier and it can be for flexible on the channels as well. You can run 8 ohm, 4 ohm, 2 ohm or each channel can be selectable. You could run 100.
70 Volt lines throughout the channels. We have built in 96 kilohertz Dsps. As mentioned, we have smart Power bridge doubling the power on any channel. So if we looked at the first amplifier where we have a 30 Watt, 4 channel amplifier on one of those channels, you could double the power to 60 watts but retain the power on the other three channels.
And as mentioned, we have complete selectability on low Z or high Z per channel. I will also add that the software sharkware and the web GUI that Benza spoke about earlier, they're all free of charge and will remain free of charge, which is a huge asset for when selling and speaking with a customer. Next slide, please, Ben. You'll begin to see a pattern with the naming here. So if we look down to,
for example, the CONNECT 164D that is 160 Watt 4 channel amplifier, but at the end we now have the D designation, which denotes that the amplifier is. Dante enabled. There appears to be quite a large range of amplifiers. This is because if a tender comes out asking for 160 Watt amplifier and all we made was 100 Watt or 200 Watt amplifier. The price of ampf would either be too expensive or it wouldn't meet the criteria of the tender.
But we have the full range ranging from 30 watts, right the way up to the newly released 3000 Watt amplifier, which also comes in Dante format and has advanced DSP as well. We have primary and secondary Dante inputs. Sorry mate, we have primary and secondary dentory So let's take. inputs and another feature which is key and I really like is what we call the Dante on REM. This allows you to take an analogue source, plug it into the amplifier, which will then allow it to appear on your Dante matrix, and you can use it from the Dante and send it to any other Dante devices. Now we're good to go.
We wanted to talk about this particular model because knowing the market, the UK market in particular and the markets that you work in, corporate education is 1/2 rack model. It's a very powerful model which we have a range of 30 by 460 by 480 by 4 and 120 watts by 4 channel, which still has smart power. So you can still double one of those channels if you want to to run to. A sub roofer or something. In addition, with the half rack we have mic input, both line and balance in line MIC inputs. Each of the half racks comes with the mounting kits for table Mount Wall mount and blanking panels.
We also have digital iOS and again Dante can be available for select Dante model and I'm sure if we can look at it very closely, you see an LCD screen which appears just to the left of the phono input. This is for when you. Oh, perfect. Really time there. Nice laser. Thank you. This is when you're connecting via AP mode or wide mode. It gives you your IP address, so you put 194.168.1.1.
I could then connect to that amp from my mobile via AP via Wired via Wireless and then take control of the amplifier. If we move on to the back. Of the amplifiers Ben, it's probably a good time for you to step back in. You can cover this bit off for me. You know, I'm. I'm always nerdy. I get excited about. I get excited about hardware.
Yeah. So yeah, just taking a quick look at the back of the amplifiers, you can see we've got the bigger two RU unit down at the bottom, which is the 1504 which we also share a chassis with the 3004. So the much higher output units, don't forget we can still do the smart power bridge on those on the 3004. We can even go up to 6000 watts of power delivery, which is just absolutely nuts. The the features on the back are fairly shared across the one RU and the two RU units.
So on the two RU units, you'll see you've got primary and secondary Dante Networks because these are typically going to be put in large scale deployments of redundancies. Obviously going to become much more key there. We've also got control ports. So we can split out our control control. And if we need to standard euroblock connectors and one thing I didn't mention earlier is we've actually got three different ways of connecting to the amplifier.
So we've got our standard hardwired connection and that's where we can just remotely invite the IP address and use the web UI nice and straight forward. We can connect to the venue's Wi-Fi and then access it from mobile or laptop as well. Or probably my favorite and most time saving way of connecting to these amps when on site is they've also got a built in access point. So this means before the AV networks, even in you still got engineers and stuff still on site cabling everything and everyone behind and. I still need to get in and do my job. We can go around to the back of the units and enable an access point built in get on board, do all the configuration disconnects and connect into the next one.
There's a small little button there, you can just see it's got the Wi-Fi logo above it. That exists on all three of the amplifiers, but it just makes it really, really easy to connect while that AP. We've also got some basic control logic inputs for power control and then like Jeff said, we've got the unbalanced inputs as well on the heart rack series. So obviously these are designed potentially for more a retail or hospitality environments somewhere where you're quite likely to have a background music player or something that's an unbalanced source.
So we've got both balanced and unbalanced inputs on the smaller units because of the markets they're tailored for. And yes, that very nice new little LED screen on the rear. The LED screen, just for reference, is on the front of the single unw amplifiers. We have also increased the range and we've now integrated in our own specific touch panel control, which has its which full color touch panel with volume control volume not control. We have Power over Ethernet for easy installation. It fits into your standard EU gang box.
We have volume and mute control for single zone source select for single zone and we control up to 100 single zones. From one CS touch or we can group up to 100 amplifier channels into a single group control group, volume control, mute and source select. This works quite nicely because we don't need the integration of the DSP.
And again, I'll pass this over to Den because he he loves to talk about this. Don't you, Ben? Yeah. So the reason that the touch controller's been introduced is because we've got that comprehensive onboard DSP. We've obviously got Dante IO capability as well as sending channels off elsewhere using the on ramp. Really, is there much need for an external DSP? Especially when we're looking again back into that retail and hospitality environment. So let's say we've got one of our half
rack series amplifiers hidden behind the bar. It's powering the system. We've got our BGM running into that. All we really need is volume and source control. Or maybe even just volume remote control over multiple zones.
Building the CS touch that eliminates the need for an external DSP. We don't need to be putting even more hardware in, and actually we can just put a controller per zone and control all of our system with source level and muting. So it's just nice and straightforward and saves building out a wider system when we've actually got an insanely powerful amplifier that's got all the brains inside already with that remote monitoring as well. So the touch just rounds out the range nicely and saves us putting in additional hard.
The next slide is an awful mug shot of me because it's taken from a video. This is a video we're about to release shortly where Andrew and I. Does it take about 10 years ago, Ben? That was no. That was a few weeks ago. That was but just hidden behind the title. There's a you can see the half rack unit hiding there behind the title.
We love these amplifiers. The Lea Kit is so so good for us in terms of scalability. It makes system design really really easy, like Jeff said, because there's so many power variants, it makes scaling up for large scale deployments or different power requirements really easy.
We had a tender which will remain nameless. But we are able to go up against another large amplified manufacturer and win quite significantly on price because we're able to pick amplifiers throughout the range which all have the same features and the same, you know, built in intelligence but match the power requirements including using smart power. Bridge to out specify the other amplifier brands that were involved. Just because the amount of configurability we've got on there in terms of stacking the units together, you can see from that image. The the units look absolutely epic when you fill an entire rack with them.
It's great looking hardware. And yeah, the Pcbs for any of you that have got hands on them before, it's not that I'm encouraging you to take the lids off, but if you ever see Lea at a trade show, they'll always be a unit without the lid on. There is yeah. Shark bites out of the Pcb's and some really nice hidden hidden gems under the hood of these amps. So it's always always nice to have a little peek in.
Just coming in on that point there, Ben, we you're going to ask the question. The amplifiers have a five year warranty on them from date of installation. So not from the date you've purchased from audiologic from the date you actually install the amps. Great point. Thank you.
Yeah, I always forget to talk about warranties. That's always nice. Five years. It's kind of becoming a new standard now, which is great. Because we never need them. We never breakdown.
Exactly, exactly. In terms of connectivity, just really hammering home how useful cloud can be for me and the team. Obviously we use Teamviewer Day in day out to remote into all kinds of AV systems and troubleshoot what's going on with LE a clouds. If we've got access to the customer site, it's dead easy for us because we can go straight onto our cloud management, see the access. All the different sites we can even set up fault and alert monitoring so that if one of the amplifiers goes down or we don't see input that we get a triggered e-mail alert to say that someone's having issues or we need to take a look at this. We've actually used this for a large scale juice chain in the UK.
Again, I won't name names, but because all the amplifiers are on cloud, we can actually see branch by branch. What's going on? What level? They're running the music at what's the content set? Election is even down to the load monitoring on the line, so it just becomes super easy for us to support. For those of you that are offering managed services as part of your integration package, this is a great bolt onto that. And again because there's no cost, it's a really nice easy thing to add on. And then the on site tools just to make your commissioning job even. Easier things like the built in access Point, you've got signal generators, sign gents in there again just makes commissioning an on site deployment nice and straightforward.
Course, that was a fairly whistle stop tour in terms of recap. We just wanted to really hammer home today how smart these amplifiers are. All of the features that are included in there, including the software, especially with the cloud functionality and also show more of you about the half rack unit which won the latest units and the latest R. To ship Geoff, is there anything you want to add in? Yeah. Look, both Ben and I and the Audiologic team are more than happy to bring these amplifiers to you and leave demo models with you. The best way to to find the real benefits and features is to play with the software.
It is extremely intuitive and it runs across the entire range. I'm more than comfortable using the control software and monitoring software. I can even set up the touch panels because there is there is no programming involved. So yeah, please reach out to either Ben or myself.
For the Audiologic team, ask for a demo kit or ask for us to arrange some demonstrations, and we'll be glad to come and visit you. Yep, great point. Always, always happy to demo these. You're welcome to set up a video call with us here at Audiologic. We've got loads of the Lea amps on site so we can show you through the hardware what it's doing. I can walk you through that in a video call.
That's all nice and straightforward. Cool. Should we dive onto the Q and AI? Have not been watching what's been going on. I've been too focusing on waffling, but I've just had a look saying 5 minutes left so it looks like we're bang on time so far. I can see a little red dot in the Q&A. So where should we get started? Oh, great question.
So Joe has asked, does it have Q sys integration? Yes, there is an L eae plug in available for Q Ah. sys. It gives you some fantastic readouts and all data and control of the amplifiers free to download. Obviously, as with most Q SYS plugins. So yes, we we run that plug in as part of the office that I'm running now. We have Q sys back end for everything with the Lea plug in running on that. Great question.
We have a range of plug in API's for the amplifiers so we have crestron AP is QC, AP is control for extra ONS, event RTI. If you look on to the website it will tell you the AP is we've got available. We've got around 8000A. Downloads so far. Downloaded so far, so they're regularly used. We also covered off the speaker tunings briefly, so you might as well go there. We have the majority of speaker tunings. We like to think we.
Are friendly with all speaker manufacturers. This allows very simple integration application where you go online, you pull down for example the JBL speaker tuning or the Bose speaker tuning. You are choir. You plug that into the amplifier that sets all the EQ levels and the limiters for that system, meaning that you should have a safe system. You can't damage it by turning it up too
high. Who have you been? Kill Next up? Mark's asked. What support is available in the UK respect to specifying a system design and commissioning? I mean that is definitely a loaded question for me, isn't it? Obviously Audiologic, that's exactly what we're here to do.
If you need help specifying L EA into your first or your 100th project, please do come and speak to myself and the team. We've got a team of six engineers here, and like I've said, everything from pre sales design. Schematics, drawings all the way through to coming on site and commissioning and deploying with you is absolutely available in House so.
Yes, please do. Drop me all the support team. An e-mail on that one. That's absolutely fine. I think that might be it for questions. All we got new posts bear with.
Cloud monitoring is becoming a standard in the industry. What sets the LE a cloud apart? Oh, for me. Firstly, it's free of charge. I will throw that straight out there. Endpoint.
Yeah, I think ease of use. We've all seen how complex cloud deployments can get, and arguably fairly unnecessarily. For me, this is so simple you just put Internet connection into the back of the amp. There's no complexity requirements from their side of the network. We're not asking for a load of stuff to be, you know, bypass or anything. It might be security conscious or anything like that.
It's just a really, really easy deployment and like we keep saying, this isn't a charge for thing and we're not going to license this. So it's a much easier way than other people have taken an approach to it. Here's another fun part to that. Is that we work on a universal language and that universal language is emojis. So if you have a happy emoji on your cloud, you can.
Or the amplifier. You can see straight away everything is working perfectly. If you have an angry emoji on the amplifier on the cloud when reviewing it means that something that the amplifiers connect to connected to isn't working properly and in the very rare case that you get a sad crying E. It means there's something directly wrong with the amplifier. Great question from James.
Is the hotspot completely isolated from the wires network ports? Yes, when you enable the AP mode, it disables the hardwired connection. So it will kill any physical connections. It's for temporary overrides, so you can then connect the amplifier.
We do also do a SKU that does exist in the price list. If it's a security conscious site where there might be concerns about the access point. If you're talking government or anything, you know financial, anything that security really is key. We can also manufacture. The amplifiers without the AP, that is something that's available on the price list and we can quote for obviously for the majority deployments having the AP in there is absolutely fine. And Simon's asked, can we request speaker tunings for specific manufacturers to be included? You can absolutely ask Simon.
We have asked pretty much anyone. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of how Nice other manufacturers want to play. I think everyone probably on this webinar is aware. That some manufacturers play nicer than others when it comes to sharing speaker tuning information. We do have speaker tuning files for the majority of the major manufacturers. If you.
We have over 3000 speaker tuning speaker tuning files. So yeah, again, have a quick look on the website and they're all readily available to see. But if there is one missing, then just just send us a message and say, look, we'd really be interested in this and hopefully if there are factors keen to work with us, we'll make that happen. Oh, great questions. Thanks guys. All things that we hadn't planned for, but all very sensible stuff that I'll make sure I cover as part of the presentation next time. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for joining.
Appreciate you taking half an hour out. I know webinars and video calls and everything are going on all the time these days, so we do appreciate you guys coming. Like I said, we will follow up with a recording and some additional information after this, but please do fire an e-mail back if there's any questions, and me and Jeff will jump straight on that. We'll likely be running this again at some point in the future as well, so if you want to join again or send any of your colleagues, please do get involved.
Thanks Jeff. But thank you, Ben. Brilliantly put. See you guys. Will speak to you soon. Take care. See you.
Thank you. Bye bye.
2025-03-23 05:35
