Barix unveils new Innovation Center in Portugal

The center focuses on “what’s next” for the company, including audio analytics, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and environmental sound monitoring

IP audio and control innovator Barix announces the opening of a new research and development center for next-generation, intelligent audio technologies. Based in Aveiro, Portugal, the Barix Innovation Center focuses on “what’s next” for the company, including audio analytics, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and environmental sound monitoring. 

Barix Founder and CTO Johannes Rietschel identified Aveiro as the ideal location given its proximity to the University of Aveiro, one of Europe’s leading technical institutions. Barix has been aggressively hiring local engineering talent, including recent university graduates, to fill key engineering and research roles. The close proximity to one of Barix’ long-term, strategic production partners, HFA SA, will further accelerate Barix’s ability to quickly build custom solutions at this new facility.

Barix’s business headquarters will remain in Zurich, and will retain its local engineering talent alongside all sales, marketing, product management and other staff.

“Aveiro is known as Portugal’s ‘digital city’ and produces a high rate of digital technology innovations, many of which originate from university students and graduates,” said Rietschel. “Our new Innovation Center places Barix in the center of European digital development – a perfect home for Barix, which has brought Audio over IP innovations to broadcast, commercial AV, security, retail and other markets for 20 years. This new location does not replace our Zurich operation; rather, it will propel Barix innovation in new directions. And we will use our latest-generation, modular platforms to build very powerful, reliable, compact and energy-efficient solutions that serve a continually evolving set of end user requirements.”

At the recent ISE 2020 Show for AV professionals, Barix offered a preview into its next-generation intelligent Audio over IP solutions. These include environmental audio monitoring, detection and analytics solutions for everything from general concerns (noise measurement) to highly sensitive operations (global, universal emergency intercoms, government facility monitoring).

“The new age of intelligent, widespread devices that understand and hear their surrounding is only beginning,” said Reto Brader, CEO, Barix. “We expect widespread adoption of AI and adaptive learning innovations in all of our markets, and we are proud to have secured highly qualified talent in Portugal for our next-generation research and development team.”

Among the first manufacturers to bring Audio over IP products to market, Barix enjoys an exceptionally large base of installed products worldwide, including custom-developed OEM products for other companies. In recent years, Barix has accelerated product development for its core markets, including multi-site audio distribution (RetailPlayer, SoundScape), intercom and paging (Paging Cloud, IP Former), and broadcast audio transport (SIP Opus hardware codecs, Reflector uncompressed streaming service).

Barix will demonstrate these now-shipping products, along with next-generation prototypes from the new Barix Innovation Center, at the 2020 NAB Show for broadcasters (April 19-22, Las Vegas Convention Center, Booth C1139) InfoComm 2020 for AV professionals (June 17-19, Las Vegas Convention Center, Booth C6150), and ISC West for security professionals (July 2020, Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Booth 19140; rescheduled from March 17-19).