1602 Group, Archwave, and TOA Corporation join the Open Control Architecture Alliance

	Ethan Wetzell of the OCA Alliance

The OCA Alliance, the AV industry alliance promoting awareness and adoption of Open Control Architecture (the Audio Engineering Society AES70 standard), has announced the membership of three new member companies. 1602 Group, Archwave, and TOA Corporation have all joined the alliance following its exhibiting at InfoComm 2016, where it featured a powerful live demonstration of AES70 interoperability on its booth.

Citing the opportunity "to contribute to a more open and efficient transfer of control data between products", Duncan Crundwell, 1602 Group systems architect and director, stated, "1602 Group is excited to be part of the OCA Alliance. Starting out in the late 1960s controlling musical instruments we were, as part of Solid State Logic, a founding member of the MIDI specification and have experience in working together with other organizations to improve the end user experience."

"Our recent work with custom touchscreen controls for audio show control led us to OCA, and we look forward to working with AES70 using our new AV-Portal system."

1602 Group designs and manufactures custom control systems as an OEM manufacturer, specializing in being a technology partner to companies who want to use the latest electronic technology in their products but do not have the in-house experience to do so. Headquartered in rural Suffolk in the UK and Washington, DC in the US, the country has around 16,000 product installations in 24 countries around the world, including the likes of Sydney Opera House and The Disney Concert Hall and for major international events including both the London and Sochi Olympics.

Archwave Technologies, the Swiss-based AoIP live sound networking and USB audio streaming specialist, is already a leading exponent of an open standards development approach, with both its AudioLan and USB Audio product suites being AES67 and Ravenna complaint.

Arie van den Broek, chief executive officer, explained, "Being dedicated to open technologies and standardization in Audio-over-IP, joining the OCA Alliance and, therewith, supporting the AES70 standard, was a logical extension to Archwave's current leading position as provider for modular AoIP solutions for RAVENNA and AES67. We are excited to work with the OCA Alliance and its members to further promote AES70-standard in our industry."

TOA Corporation is among the world's leading, largest and most widely recognized commercial audio corporations, manufacturing and supplying large-scale sound reinforcement, voice communication, evacuation and emergency paging systems, AV security systems, conferencing and congress technologies throughout the world.

With more than 80 years experience as a designer and manufacturer of high quality professional audio products, the corporation's participation in the alliance is a highly significant in the potential furtherance of OCA / AES70 as an industry-wide standard.

Commenting for the OCA Alliance, Ethan Wetzell, engineering core platform strategist at Bosch pronounced the success of InfoComm 2016 for the alliance, "InfoComm was a major success, in that AES ratification of OCA attracted significantly greater attention from all manner of AV manufacturers, and that our live demonstration illustrated latest technology developments, including software tools and hardware reference designs from OCA Alliance member companies, that showed, more than ever before, the potential power and extensive capabilities of the standard."