Shortages of key semiconductor components have been accelerating a shift towards the adoption of software solutions in audio products.

That’s according to a briefing at InfoComm by Joshua Rush, chief marketing officer, and Chris Ware, senior vice president of product development at Audinate. Rush and Ware were joined by TJ Adams, vice president of systems product strategy and development at QSC.

The shift towards software is not just happening in the products that Audinate supplies but also in the products its manufacturer customers produce too, they said.

Rush and Ware were speaking about the actions that Audinate has taken to minimise and mitigate the impact of global supply issues. Despite challenges which took on additional complexity in Q3 of last year the company has actually shipped more units of its chips, cards and modules through May 2022 than in the same period a year before – and more than in the same period throughout the entire history of the company.

To counter the chip shortage, Audinate has acted as an advocate for the industry with leading chip suppliers such as Xilinx, NXP, and SkyWorks, lobbying for increased allocation on behalf of over 500 Dante manufacturer licensees. Audinate has redesigned its products around chip issues and is introducing next-generation replacement products for its Brooklyn and Fremont modules. The company has also encouraged faster adoption of its own software offerings, with the Dante Embedded Platform and the Dante IP Core, amplifying a trend that was already under way.

In his remarks, Rush said that Dante’s software solutions used chips that were more readily available than the bespoke chips used in its hardware products and the same was true for QSC’s software solutions, according to TJ Adams, who added: “In some ways, unfortunately, the industry holds back on adopting software. It’s a little scary, It’s nebulous. It’s not as tangible. So we are doing everything we can to encourage our customers to see the value and power of software.”

Asked how fast the trend towards software had moved and whether the shift was voluntary on the part of manufacturers, Rush added: “Every manufacturer is different. It was something on their roadmap and they were interested in its benefits. Would they have done it as quickly? Maybe not. Some of it was a result of not being able to get parts but overall the trajectory was migration to software.”