Underscoring the increasing progress that the audio-video manufacturing community is making in arriving at working AVB solutions, AVnu Alliance hosted an AVB plugfest last week at Harman Professional’s Signal Processing Group in Salt Lake City. The AVnu Alliance is the industry forum dedicated to the advancement of professional-quality audio video by promoting the adoption of the IEEE 802.1 Audio Video Bridging (AVB) standards over various networking link-layers. The plugfest — an invitation-only gathering of hardware manufacturers with near-market ready products —featured Harman and five other manufacturers testing interoperability and performance of AVB prototype technologies. During the plugfest, engineers from the different companies had a rare hands-on opportunity to test connectivity, interoperability and interfaces.
“The promise of AVB is universal connectivity with no performance compromises,� said Rob Urry, Harman Professional CTO, Vice President / GM Harman Professional Signal Processing Group. “But to achieve this, all participants on the AVB network
need to be able to connect and comprehensively test their technologies on the network. The plugfest enabled this testing but also provided a platform for remarkable, valuable dialog between very smart, committed engineers from a host of companies. We were very pleased to host this plugfest and to mark another important milestone in the advancement of AVB.�Echoing this sentiment, Lee Minich, Marketing Working Group Chair, AVnu Alliance, and President, Lab X Technologies, noted, “Communication — whether it’s for performance, commercial, medical or educational applications — is accelerated enormously by AV technologies. In turn, AVB is already making AV communications more effective, more usable and more affordable than ever before. This transformative IEEE protocol is enabled by the AVnu Alliance companies who attend plugfests to share ideas and experiences. Their communication at this event will eventually advance AV communications across our industry around the world.�
As many of the products and technologies tested in the plugfest are still in the development phase, details of the participants and the technologies they tested must be retained until market-ready. The fact that this is now the fifth successful AVB PlugFest is an indicator of the forward momentum. The first AVnu Alliance AVB plugfest was also held at Harman Professional Signal Processing Group in Salt Lake City and featured technologies from four AVnu Alliance member companies.
HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets – supported by 15 leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon® and Mark Levinson®. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 20 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of about 11,000 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported sales of $3.2 billion for the last twelve months ended March 31, 2010. The Company’s shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NYSE:HAR.
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For additional information, contact:
Daniel O’Connell
Definition Branding & Marketing
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