Summary of some Solidyne's contributions to Broadcast Engineering

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Solidyne: a brief overview

Solidyne was founded in 1968 by Oscar Bonello, its CEO. Mr Bonello is an Argentine researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
Solidyne has now a team of 50 people working in our company. The secret of the Solidyne's success at the radio market and professional audio field, is very simple: Our obsession by Research and permanent Innovation.

Solidyne had manufactured open reel magnetic tape recorders, using dynamic bias and self-aligned by computer, PBX telephonic centrals and user telephones, communications between energy networks, Communications centers for the Argentina Air Force, Army, Gendarmerie, etc
From 1980 we are working in the field of the 24 hours Voice Loggers, and we were one of the few international companies manufacturing multi-channel magnetic tape recorders (Medical Emergencies, Electrical Companies, Ambulances, etc).

From 2004 up to the present, we manufacture AR-200 Digital Voice Loggers with state of the art technology: digital encrypted recording on Hard Disk; another one of the inventions of Solidyne. This small size 16, 24 & 32 channels recorders have open architecture, high reliability and low cost

In the field of Audio Processing we are the company with more experience of the world. Solidyne's papers published from 1970 can be found in the bibliography of this field.
We started the era of the Psychoacoustic Processing in Broadcasting with the publication of an original paper, at AES Journal, June 76, New York.

Solidyne was the first world company that creates a digital audio system based on PC, for radio automation.
See below a history of this innovation, the most important radio innovation of the second half of XX Century.

Due to this invention, in 1992 Solidyne was awarded with the First National Prize to the Technological Innovation. The Audicom system has been sold in 45 countries. Today this technology is used in radio stations of more than 120 countries.

Since 1970 we contributed in technical and scientific exhibitions.
Solidyne has published more than 150 papers in several international magazines.
We have 12 Patents of Invention. We have received numerous prizes by our scientific and industrial work.

In the scientific field, our theories are today included in text books of Audio and Acoustic used in many Universities of the world. We mentioned, for example, the "Handbook for Sound Engineers", Glenn Ballou (Howard Sams); "Acoustics" of Alton Everest (McGraw-Hill), etc

The invention of the PC
Radio Automation

Old PC audio card
manufactured by
Solidyne in 1990

The PC soon becomes
a familiar device
in radio studios

Modern 12 channels
PC card with internal DSP

In 1983 a new idea was born in Solidyne; to replace the open reel tape recorders and cartridge player, by a new technology based on Hard Disk storage, using as working platform an IBM PC computer that had arrived at the market the previous year

The idea was considered by many engineers like impossible, because the sound cards had still not been invented... and the capacity of storage in HD was smaller than 30 MB. On the other hand, nobody thought about that time in using a computer within a Radio study (an engineer from USA said to us: "computers and consoles are like the water and oil; they never will be mixed! "

But at this point a notable synergy takes place that allowed Solidyne to be the first world company to perform this invention. The fact is that for that date Prof Bonello was teaching Electro Acoustics at the University, and the Psychoacoustic was his main field of interest. The Bonellos's idea was to use the human ear Masking effect, to reduce the amount of bytes necessary to codify an audio signal. This was the first application of Masking to digital audio.
This idea was very new and so strong that today all the forthcoming compression standards in the world (MP3 included) use the same principle we developed 20 years ago !

During 5 years of research & development of the compression technology, the ECAM was created. After that, Solidyne created sound cards for PC (nobody manufactured audio cards at that moment), and the software that supported the new technology. In 1988 the new system was presented in South America at the Communication Secretary, in Argentina. In 1990 at the NAB world exhibition in Atlanta, USA, it was presented to the rest of the world. Solidyne was the only company, at NAB 90, that offered a PC automation system.

In that opportunity, when seeing the Audicom, the president of the NAB said: this is not a simple advance; it is the re-invention of the Radio... and he was right !. Solidyne, yet today, was the only company in the world that faced the simultaneous solution of the 3 key technologies that gave access to audio in PC:

1) The compression algorithm
2) The audio interface (Sound card)
3) The application software.

In 1992 by this invention we were awarded with the First National Prize to the Technological Innovation

Although in 1990 many engineers of radio insisted that: never a computer within a radio study would be accepted, the experience demonstrates that they were mistaken...

Today the PC is so indispensable in a Radio Station as before were the open reel recorders or the cartridge player (we have pushed both towards the Museum…). The invention of Solidyne, today has crossed the world, sometimes in our own version, the Audicom, or by other software developers.

Solidyne never apply for invention patents of this device, because we wished that all the radio stations of the world can freely use the benefits of the Audio & Computer technologies.

Fortunately, this dream has come true

Some Awards

1973 - Honor Award for Industrial Design, CIDI, Argentina

1978 - Mr Bonello becomes a Senior Member IEEE, USA and Member
             of the New York Academy of Science, USA

1992 - First National Prize for Innovation (Audicom technology),
            Banco Frances, Argentina

1997 - Special Award to the technological Innovation, Banco Frances, Argentina

2000 - Fundación BACH, Argentina. Nomination as outstanding Audio Engineer.

2005- Buenos Aires City Government, Award for the creation
           of RadioImagen .technology

2007- Fellowship Award, Audio Engineering Society, New York, USA (www.aes.org)

2009 - First Prize to the Technological Innovation in Broadcasting, granted
            by the Consejo Profesional de Ingeniería, Argentina

Some Invention Patents

PATENT 184.619 Photorresistive fader

PATENT 198.911 Audio Matrix

PATENT 215.101 Autoset Hybrid

PATENT 217.193 Virtual flux input transformer

PATENT 218.707 High performance magnetic recording system

PATENT 236.414 TDM tech for Audio conmutation

PATENT 237.296 New system of UPS distributed power

PATENT 237.301 A.I. Phone Agenda

PATENT PEN 030101875 Contactless ESF fader