With NAB drawing to a close, we scoured the halls for more obscure and wacky products hoping to find some hidden technology jewels in the vast Las Vegas Convention Center. What we found was some gear that got us excited, but was unfortunately reserved for the deep-pocketed budgets of major film production studios or governments.

AMD - Audio Processing Monster

The AMD booth show cased their AMD Audio Workstation that fits into a transportable, shock-mounted box. This dual Opteron 252 is powered by 4 GB of DDR 400 SDRAM and 1 TB of SATA storage. Meant for recording live music concerts for posterity, the digital audio workstation (DAW), replaces an 18 wheeler full of sound equipment.

The system offers 48 channels of audio that can be recorded at 24 bits and a 96 kb/s rate. After the concert is finished, the audio is transferred via Firewire to an external hard-drive. The hard-drive is then express mailed to the studio for further processing.