In my last post about the relevance of design in AV equipment, I invited us to imagine a world where a chassis existed that was made from a single piece of metal. I theorized that such a design innovation would help integrators exponentially with installation and maintenance. That a high-quality product located at the intersection of user/integrator ease, efficient manufacturing, and aesthetics would be a win for integrators, end users, and the audio industry in general. Biamp has put this theory into practice with TesiraFORTÉ.

When the Tesira line was imagined, the DSP we know as Tesira was only part one. TesiraFORTÉ was part two.

TesiraFORTÉ is Tesira Part II

At the same time we were finding a way to physically scale Tesira down while maintaining or improving the design, product management settled on the functionality piece of the puzzle: a series of application-specific, small format DSPs. Inside and out, TesiraFORTÉ is a simpler Tesira DSP with the same server-class processing power, but for smaller applications.

There are three TesiraFORTÉ innovations I’d like to highlight: 1) single sheet of metal chassis construction, 2) easy-off chassis cover, and 3) easy-off front panel.

  1. Single Sheet of Metal TesiraFORTÉ Chassis Construction

    2. Ease of assembly and disassembly was the goal here. From a product design perspective, making a chassis out of a single piece of metal is a great idea. It eliminates the number of screws since there are fewer moving parts that integrators have to deal with.

    The entire TesiraFORTÉ chassis is a box, not pieces of sheet metal screwed together to create a box. The sheet metal is bent into a completed box, two screws are put in for integrity, and then the customized unit is built on the production line, inside the box.

  2. Easy-Off TesiraFORTÉ Chassis Cover

    3. The cover of TesiraFORTÉ is held on with metal fingers, three screws, and three tabs. You just slide the fingers into the designated holes in the front of the chassis, slide the three tabs into place, screw in the three retention screws and voila!, the cover is secured.

    With three screws to attach the cover to the chassis, and two screws to hold the chassis together, TesiraFORTÉ is held together by five screws. Why am I making such a big deal about the number of screws in a chassis? Because screws are labor and labor is money. Less screws, less time and money spent unscrewing screws.

  3. Easy-Off TesiraFORTÉ Front Panel

    4. When we designed the Tesira SERVER, we knew it was going to have a fan, and that the filter in the unit would need to be cleaned. A removable magnetic front panel was our way of making that process easier for integrators and end users. We wanted Tesira 2.0 to expand on this innovation, so TesiraFORTÉ has three snaps that hold the whole front on. Snaps, not screws. The whole front assembly of the chassis is a sub-assembly in itself with one ribbon cable coming through the back (in orange in the diagram). That ribbon cable is fed through the chassis and the plastic front panel snaps onto the chassis.

The hardware construction and the processing guts of TesiraFORTÉ combine to create a slimmer, simpler, small format Tesira DSP with just as much power as the SERVER and SERVER-IO.

Now that we’ve created a chassis with very few screws, maybe the next step is a chassis with no screws at all! I don’t know if that’s possible yet, but nothing is until it is, right?

Stay tuned.