AES Student Blog

Merging Technologies

Merging Technologies is the world’s foremost manufacturer of high-resolution digital audio recording systems.  The list of customers reads like a who’s who in the recording industry and recordings made with Merging Technologies’ systems regularly receive the recording industry’s prestigious Grammy® Award.

The company was founded in 1990 in Chexbres, Switzerland by Claude Cellier; an electronics graduate of the Institute of Technology in Lausanne.   Prior to this, Claude worked for the famous Swiss audio maker Nagra Kudelski for 10 years.

Within a short time of its founding, Merging quickly established a reputation for their expertise in digital signal processing and associated hardware, and with their Pyramix Virtual Studio, was one of the first companies to produce a DSD recording system. The DXD format, (Digital eXtreme Definition) operating at 352.8kHz/24bit, was developed by Merging Technologies in collaboration with Philips, to overcome the challenges in editing and mastering DSD for SACD.

As the CEO of Merging Technologies and the chief designer of the hardware and system design for the Pyramix Virtual Studio, he developed and brought to market several generations of high performance DSP cards and the latest Horus and Hapi Networked Audio Interfaces have followed this tradition of sonic excellence and innovative design. A key element of these products was the design and architecture of the RAVENNA/AES67 connectivity.

At the time of writing there are over 1,000 pieces of Merging Technologies’ network enabled equipment in daily use by audio professionals worldwide.  In 2007, Claude Cellier was presented with the Audio Engineering Society Fellowship Award for outstanding contributions to the development of high-performance, high-resolution audio workstations. Merging Technologies currently has over 20 employees with offices in Switzerland and the UK.