There was a lot going on in the South Hall on Day 3. Click here to check out the hot gear and news from Yamaha, Digital Audio Denmark, LightViper, Apple, Audiotechnica, Merging Technologies and Smartsound.

For the Mix crew, the press room at NAB is not only a great place to blog and file reports from, but it’s got a great ongoing buffet throughout the day that feeds and waters journalists from all over the world. It’s not uncommon to sit at a computer and hear conversations in Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, French and more.

Jeff Glixman, Zak Rizvi and Lily Salinas from Star City have just stopped by the booth. I had a visit out to Bethlehem, Penn., a month back, and they have done remarkable things with the facility and are pumping out some surround work, not to mention producing and engineering Tyrone Vaughan. Good to see you fine folks…what’s happening?
Hello everyone, we are here for a short trip to see all our friends and check out new gear. We can’t forget the major stops: in-n-out burger, china grill, Nobu, Red Rocks and of course the MIX booth to see our good friend Tom. Really hectic time so i need to run but everyone check out our new revamped website.

David Bryce had a range of ADAM monitors on display in the Radio Hall. The speakers feature their A.R.T. (Accelerated Ribbon Technology) Tranducers, perfect for broadcasters looking for smooth high frequency response for those long listening sessions.

I got the 411 from Brian Dickman on what’s happening at SmartSound. They’ve ramped up music production for their library and are currently releasing three discs a month. Be sure to check out our Day 3 Podcast for a full overview of features in their Version 4.5 software.

Robert Scovill was in the Avid booth giving demos of Digidesign’s Venue live sound desk. Digi has sold 500 units placing them in the #2 spot in two short years. They’ve got a three year deal with the Montreux Jazz Festival where there will be a Venue in use on each stage, and the desk is out on tour this summer with many of the major acts on the road. It’s also at the Palms’ new Pearl theater here in Vegas which uses two, one for FOH and another in monitor land.

Paul Saccone from Apple gave me a demo of their new Soundtrack Pro 2 software that blew me away. The interface was elegant offering a lot of great editing, workflow, importing and metering features. One of the coolest features is the meter bridge which can log peaks, giving each one a time ID. When you click on an ID, it takes you right to the peak in the timeline. Check out our Day 3 podcast for a full overview of the app.

Marc Lopez, newly promoted to the Marketing Mgr spot at Yamaha Commercial Audio, showed me some impressive upgrades to some of their existing products. The new DSP-5D is literally a PM5D in a box offering 48 inputs and DSP, and is controllable either from a PM5D console or an LS9 console. They also showed the DM2000 VCM which adds a bevy of new effects and other processing to the DM2000. All new consoles ship with the package and it is also avaialble as an upgrade. Marc goes over the whole system in our Day 3 Podcast.

This HUGE tower is on an 8,000 lb. ENG van parked between the halls in the demo area. There’s all kinds of interesting stuff out there including daylight video displays, Hummers with satellite uplinks, large remote trucks and more.

I interviewed Claude Cellier from Merging Technologies for our show closer Podcast and got an overview of new products that are pretty darn interesting. They’ve collaborated with Smart AV and came up with the Ramses control surface, a cool looking controller for Pyramix. The Sphynx 3 I/O boxes are also impressive offering a number of options, even embedded mic preamps. The whole rig MADIs out to the CPU so you can have the preamps close to the source. They’re also unveling Pyramix 6 soon which will offer the first 48 channel DSD/DXD capability ever.