Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1259912
66 S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Tell me about how the Scorpio came to be. It's not unheard of now for productions to want every person on camera to have their own ISO track on a wireless mic. The 8-Series Scorpio is a result of this growing desire for more and more tracks, more and more outputs, and more and more routing capability. It's a trend that's been going on for a number of years. You can easily see the legacy of it. The interface takes a lot from the 6-Series, but it also takes a lot from the 788. We've taken those two lines of product development, merged them into the Scorpio, and multiplied that capability by a factor of a thousand. It's by far our most powerful product to date. It clearly has Sound Devices' DNA, but this is next level. It's a totally new design from a hardware perspective, from the ground up, and operating system point of view. It was a three-year development process from scratch. We did that because we wanted to make a product that was going to have a lot of longevity in the market. We had to stare into our crystal ball and decide what we are going to need to be able to do in the next 10-20 years with this product. It's an FPGA MEET THE WINNERS Paul Isaacs heads the development team for the Sound Devices Scorpio and was happy to tell us about the development and feature set. Paul came to Sound Devices 12 years ago as a Londoner living in New Zealand. You may be familiar with another groundbreaking product that he developed: the HHB Portadat. From crossing paths at trade shows to contract engineering from New Zealand, Matt Anderson (CEO of Sound Devices) and the Sound Devices team lured him to Madison, Wisconsin, when the 788 was starting to take off. He's been very happy working for a great company, and the Scorpio is evidence of that. Paul took some time to chat about the Scorpio. Outstanding Product – Production Sound Devices' Scorpio by G. John Garrett CAS (field programmable gate array)-based architecture, which is programmable hardware. It gives us great flexibility (in future development). Some of the constraints of hardware are lifted. Not totally, but we have a lot more flexibility than we did with the 6-Series and others. That sounds powerful. We had a lot of 7-Series users that didn't want to go down the 6-Series route because we simplified things down a little bit with the 6-Series, which was good for usability for some users. So, we decided to go back for more flexibility and take it another step. For example, there are 16 mic preamps in this one small box, all powered from battery. And they're the best mic preamps we have made yet, with a lower noise floor and a much wider dynamic range. Next, we understood from 788 users that they wanted an internal drive, and the feeling that you have a non-removeable drive adds a level of confidence. We have a 256 GB SSD internal drive, allowing you to record simultaneously to three drives, so all that redundancy is there. How about power? The Scorpio runs on 10 VDC-18 VDC and we support Smart batteries, which are becoming quite popular, so we can display exactly what's going on with the battery now. We have battery charging built in. You can charge two LMounts on the back simultaneously while you record. Tell us about some of the other features. We've done a few improvements in the timecode section, too, [because] when you're doing really long-take recording, you need more than just timecode to maintain sync. Traditionally, you had to use word clock, but with our implementation in Scorpio, we can extract the accurate clock from the timecode signal and you don't need word clock any longer. The mixing and processing and routing capability are what really unlocks the door to its power. We have 32 ISO's and four mix tracks. The 32 ISO's can be sourced from numerous inputs, the 16 mic inputs, 32 Dante inputs. Using the Dante controller with the Scorpio, you can route anything to anywhere on a massive network. We have up to 12 AES inputs available (four built-in and eight available through the Sound Devices' Scorpio