Studer D950

The Studer D950 is a modular digital mixing system introduced in the mid-1990s by the Swiss manufacturer Studer. It is built around a configurable DSP core: the channel and bus counts are not fixed but depend on the installed DSP power, the console being equipped with anywhere from a few dozen to well over a hundred channels depending on the cards fitted.

Internal processing runs in 40-bit floating point over a 32-bit bus, with 24-bit converters and 24-bit AES/EBU digital I/O. The architecture distributes processing across several DSP boards sharing a common backplane; the processing (PE) boards each provide eight AES/EBU dual-channel inputs and eight outputs.

The surface is built from four-channel fader modules (input frames of 4 to 64 strips), each strip accessing ten layers arranged in five banks of two. Reliability in critical operation relies on redundant power supplies, hot-pluggable DSP cards and a “self-healing” DSP mechanism that automatically switches a process to a spare card in case of failure.

Two notable variants shaped the line: the D950B base digital mixing system and the D950S surround version introduced at the 1997 AES, featuring VirtualSurround Panning (VSP) software for 5.1 production. Over 80 systems had been sold worldwide by autumn 2000. The D950 was replaced in the mid-2000s by Studer's Vista series.