Developed by Linea Research for its own products in live sound reinforcement, System Engineer is also a true system controller, able to connect to any Obcom-compliant device of any type or from any manufacturer.
‘We have worked hard to make System Engineer as simple and intuitive as possible,’ the company says. ‘This apparent simplicity belies a sophisticated, comprehensive workhorse built on a solid core technology designed by Linea Research. System Engineer will allow you to connect a number of devices and use it to set up, control and monitor them. System Engineer may be used for programming factory settings or configuring installations as well as live control and monitoring of devices during a performance. System Engineer can control and monitor several networks of many devices simultaneously via Ethernet (BvNET or USB for some product types).’
System Engineer is a unified control and monitoring PC application for a multitude of professional audio device types, which supports dozens of manufacturers’ products. A single click takes it online to a network of devices, while a double-click enables control any device. Continuous Discovery ensures that devices added to the system are automatically discovered andadded to System Engineer.
System Engineer frees engineers from the constraint of the one-panel-for-one-device model, allowing a system to be viewed as a logical collection of ‘modules’ that relate to speakers rather than rack boxes. Module Presets pertain to these modules and may (for example) be used to select a loudspeaker system from a library, or to apply one of a number of venue tunings specialised for different types of event.
‘Since we recognise that you may not want to connect the drivers of an enclosure to consecutive outputs on a device, the concept of Components allows you to select the settings for one Driver component from a preset and apply these settings to any one output you wish,’ Linea Research explains. ‘Snapshots take this concept one stage further by allowing you to recall a set of Presets to the Modules in the device.
‘Our approach to grouping is very intuitive and fast to set up – just drag the modules you wish to control to a Group, and adjust them all from a common panel. In addition to the normal parameters used to set up and control a device, Module Groups allow you access to an additional twelve sets of parameters that overlay the standard ones. Each of these overlays remains separate without interacting with one another, but the result is a combination of all of these layers. Even EQ can be overlaid, allowing you 13 patterns to contribute to the overall EQ for a given channel.’
The collaboration between Linea Research and AFMG has given seamless integration of System Engineer with SysTune measurement software. By using System Engineer as a plug-in to SysTune, EQ of any device can be controlled from within the SysTune application. Some devices allow certain critical parameters to be logged against time so that issues can later be diagnosed. This data is shown on the PodWare panel graphically, and it may be exported to a spreadsheet for further analysis, or can be saved in a diagnostics file.
