To be honest, I think they are aiming the two product lines at totally different markets...
Axient remains their flagship product. It's targeted at live broadcast, production
etc.
ULX-D I can see being more geared towards markets like corporate and education facilities.
Picture somewhere like a university campus in a busy city and you are always running up against interference "fun" especially with ever decreasing bandwidth.
The digital process is inherently latent. 2.9ms is utterly unaccpetable for any application using
IEM. You only have 6ms before things become noticable and to take half of that before you get to the
console is bad news.
But in a lecture
theatre it doesn't matter.
Corporate will like the digital stuff because it can be encrypted and up until now, Lectrosonics was the only player offering encrypted transmission in the
UHF TV bands to my knowledge.
Axient does NOT use WiFi. It uses a proprietary 2.4GHz
protocol that has much better distance coverage than any WiFi.
And loss of the 2.4G link does not affect the audio.
So think of Axient as digitally controlled analogue audio. The ShowLink communications is only about frequency changes,
gain changes and that sort of control. I don't know if the battery
level info
etc has now been migrated onto ShowLink or whether it remains as a
sidetone transmission like UHF-R.
So the way I see it - Axient is just UHF-R with advanced frequency management and real time interference response and
channel changes.
ULX-D is a whole new
platform that's exciting but still not quite there for live production use...