In the small world of broadcast consoles, DHD lacks the media swagger of a Lawo or a Calrec, yet the German maker has held a solid place for thirty years in radio control rooms, OB trucks and on-air studios. For IBC 2026 it promises what it frames as one of the most radical advances in its history: a third-generation audio mixing surface. The console stays under wraps until the show’s opening day, but the strategic angle is already perfectly clear.
A new surface on cores already in place
DHD’s central message boils down to one idea: you change the surface, not the whole infrastructure. The new third-generation console is announced as compatible with existing DHD processing cores, including those installed since 2020. For a broadcaster, that means modernising the operators’ working interface without scrapping the audio engine or redoing the network wiring. In a sector that thinks in 15-year investment cycles, on installations running around the clock and with tightening budgets, that kind of continuity is no marketing detail: it is often what closes a sale.
DHD sums up its philosophy through a line from managing director Marc Herrmann: “Built to last does not mean staying the same. It means achieving change efficiently and cost-effectively.” The architecture stays true to the house principle — modular consoles networked to modular processing cores. You add modules to cover a new or expanded workflow, reconfigure the console for new tasks, and swap a core for more processing power. Longevity here is not a nostalgic argument: it is an upgrade-by-building-blocks method.
Aligned with the EBU’s Dynamic Media Facility
DHD explicitly positions this console to support the shift in production workflows embodied by the EBU’s Dynamic Media Facility initiative. Behind the acronym lies a deep change in broadcast: moving from fixed, single-purpose gear to software and network resources allocated and reallocated on demand, in a logic very close to datacentre computing. A surface driving swappable, reconfigurable cores fits that trajectory exactly — the same underlying move we see in the virtualisation of Calrec’s ImPulseV audio engine or in radio consoles going fully IP, like the AEQ Forum IP Plus.
The target field stays broad: transmission control rooms, radio studios, OB trucks and SNG vehicles, ingest stations, edit suites. That is DHD’s core business, and it also explains its caution: these customers do not replace a console every three years — they want a platform that absorbs a decade of workflow change without starting over.
What remains to be seen
For now DHD is talking intent and architecture, not a spec sheet: fader count, the real ergonomics of the surface, the sharpness of the displays and end-to-end latency will only be judged on stand 8.B46, at the IBC opening, 11-14 September in Amsterdam. That is the part that truly matters to an operator, the part you judge with your hands on the faders after eight hours of live.
Still, the angle is the right one. After years in control rooms, I have seen too many installations killed off by a surface the maker stopped supporting while the audio engine still ran perfectly. A console designed to be updated module by module, without sacrificing the cores, answers a very concrete broadcaster problem. If the ergonomics live up to the openness promise, DHD may remind us that in broadcast, real innovation is not always the loudest. To understand where a console sits in the chain, our guide to on-air processing lays the groundwork. Details to come on DHD’s site.
