Telos Systems
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| Private | |
| Industry | Broadcasting |
| Founded | 1985 |
| Founder | Steve Church |
| Headquarters | Cleveland, Ohio, United States |
| Products | On-air telephone systems, broadcast codecs, audio loggers, audio processors, mixing consoles, distribution systems, TV loudness monitoring and metering tools. |
| Website | www |
The Telos Alliance is an American corporation manufacturing audio products primarily for broadcast stations. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, the company is divided into six divisions:
The Telos Alliance began as Telos Systems, a part-time project founded in 1985 by radio station engineer and talk show host (WFBQ, WMMS) Steve Church. Its inaugural product was a telephone hybrid, the Telos 10, which was based on digital signal processing. It was the first application of this technology to radio studio equipment. Sales of the Telos 10 telephone hybrid eventually increased to the point that Church decided to quit his day job and commit to the company full-time.
Over the years, Church continued to apply emerging technologies in new ways to solve problems in radio engineering. He had been researching a developing technology, known as audio coding, during the latter part of the 1980s. He made a pilgrimage to a small town in Germany to visit a research lab known as Fraunhofer. There, he learned of an exciting audio coding algorithm known as ISO MPEG Layer-III audio coding. After a listening test, Church became very excited by MPEG, and thus, Telos became the first licensee in the United States of what is now a household word-MP3.
MP3 was licensed by Telos as part of the solution to another problem that had plagued broadcasters for years. Long distance remote broadcasts had always been difficult and expensive. From the dawn of radio in the 1920s, the only option was leasing telephone lines from AT&T. In the 1970s, satellite technology became available as an alternative. Both options however, required considerable lead time, and didn't always work. There was no way to do spontaneous long distance remotes, let alone maintain broadcast audio quality.
Around the same time that MP3 audio coding was being developed, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) was also being launched. ISDN was designed to deliver simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the traditional circuits of the telephone network. Church was able to combine MP3 audio coding with ISDN technology to create a high-quality digital audio dialup service for broadcasters. The result was the Telos Zephyr, a point-to-point audio codec which made it possible for radio and television stations, networks, and recording studios to link studio quality audio paths over long distance digital telephone lines. The Zephyr revolutionized remote broadcasting, and in some ways, programming, by enabling the use of spontaneous interviews for morning drive shows and newscasts.
Next, Church turned his attention to the way audio was distributed around the broadcast plant. At that time, the infrastructure of analog radio plants consisted of miles of multiconductor audio cable wired to walls full of punch blocks at each end. Installation and maintenance was time consuming and expensive. Church set out to find a better way.
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