60 Years of Broadcast Experience
24/7 Emmy® Award-Winning Support
Flexible Payment Solutions
Designed & Engineered in the UK

Calrec is a leading designer and supplier of audio broadcast mixing equipment, relied on by the world’s most successful broadcasters. Formed as a microphone manufacturer in 1964, Calrec’s reputation for build quality, reliability and audio performance has made it an industry benchmark across the world.

Now, broadcasters demand even more versatility and integration from their audio equipment. In this highly progressive era, TV companies want to ensure that their systems can produce programmes increasingly efficiently and to exacting specifications.

For their audio systems to achieve this, greater consideration has to be given to networks as a whole, and how efficiently they can be controlled.

Calrec understands modern broadcast facilities, and works alongside broadcasters to keep ahead of the changing needs of the broadcast environment.

Calrec’s range of broadcast mixing consoles, remote production and audio networking solutions, its understanding of AoIP and IP infrastructures, and its work with third-party integration, means Calrec is at the epicentre of changing broadcast requirements.

All Calrec products are designed, engineered and tested at Calrec’s Nutclough Mill headquarters in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England.

From customer research through R&D, production and test departments, every element of product development is in-house. This ensures the integrity of the entire process and guarantees a quality standard unsurpassed in the broadcast console marketplace.

Calrec's History

For almost 60 years, Calrec has earned a reputation for innovation and has a history of technological world firsts:

1977: Calrec supplies the world’s first stereo broadcast console.

1978: Calrec launches the Soundfield microphone, the world’s first single point-source microphone capable of recording sound in three dimensions for surround-compatible playback.

1981: Calrec supplies the world’s first digitally controlled assignable mixing console.

2007: Calrec launches Bluefin, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology for full DSP processing, providing enough processing on one DSP card to power an entire mixing console, running surround-sound productions. Bluefin is available as an upgrade to existing Calrec desks and improves efficiency by a phenomenal 5000%. Bluefin is another world-first implementation of FPGA-based high-density DSP card, which permits real-time 5.1 surround mixing and superior levels of signal processing in a fraction of the space of conventional systems.

2009: Calrec unveils Bluefin2, a significant step up from Calrec’s pioneering work with FPGAs for real-time audio DSP processing. Bluefin2, the next generation of Calrec’s award-winning Bluefin technology, increases DSP capacity to a market-leading 1020 channel processing paths. Calrec also launches Hydra2, allowing the construction of complex routing networks with control software which organises all routing.

2016: Calrec launches Brio, a super-compact 36 fader surface with more faders in a given footprint than any other audio console, built in I/O and DSP and an integrated touchscreen UI.

2018: At NAB, Calrec launches the Type R console, Calrec’s first native IP product. Type R is a modular system which can be tailored to operator needs with just four hardware panels to create a variety of system types and can provide mix facilities for up to three independent mixers on one system core.

2018: Calrec unveils Calrec Assist a HTML-based remote-control UI for a range of Calrec consoles. This cloud-accessible UI allows offline configuration and formed the basis for a number of future developments including RP1, Type-R and Argo. At IBC, Calrec launches ImPulse, a powerful, IP-based, processing and routing engine which is compatible with existing Apollo and Artemis control surfaces, providing a simple upgrade path for existing Calrec users.

2020: Calrec launches the Calrec Sound Institute, featuring free certified training on Brio, Type R, Summa and AoIP, with modules on Immersive mixing in conjunction with Dolby Atmos™. Thousands of students have already taken advantage, you can too, by signing up here.

2022: Calrec unveils Argo, a new approach to audio mixing which is designed to keep pace with changes broadcasters are experiencing in their production workflows. Built around a robust ImPulse core and Calrec Assist interface, Argo provides more of what you need, wherever you need it.

2023: Calrec launches ImPulse1 IP audio processing and routing engine. Designed for small to medium single mixer applications, the powerful 1U compact solution with an optional second core for redundancy and a new 128 input channel DSP licensing pack offers entry-level pricing without compromising its ST2110 capability.

In today’s modern broadcast infrastructures, we all need to be adaptable and quick to respond. We need to talk to each other across multiple languages, and we need to support all kinds of changing workflows.

It’s an exciting time to be in broadcast audio, and Calrec is right in the middle of it.

Calrec is part of the Audiotonix group of console companies, alongside DiGiCo, Allen & Heath, SSL, KLANG:technologies, Sound Devices, Slate Digital, Harrison and Sonible.

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