28 TVBEurope Roundtable: OB Audio Mix Sound
WHEN IT comes to outside broadcasts, there is often a demand for complex audio mixing requirements — especially for high profile musical events — while coping with the limited space in trucks. Beyond that, new technologies have affected the design of consoles. For example, what are the demands of 3D? What is the current thinking about layering? Just what does the future hold for audio mixing equipment? These, and other questions, are answered by our participations. They are (in alphabetical order) James Gordon, managing director of DiGiCo; Jim Green, Calrec UK sales manager; Andrew Hills, product director, Harman Studer Professional Audio; Chris Jenkins, director of Commercial Applications at Solid State Logic; Simon Kenning, sales manager, Roland Systems Group; Felix Krückels, senior product manager mc² series at Lawo; and Alexander Nemes on behalf of Stagetec.
TVBEurope: What has been your greatest challenge over the past 12-24 months? Gordon: Establishing good connection with the market and launching a new range of consoles tailored to offering key features at a more budget- acceptable price. Green: Adapting to the demands of HD and 3D, not only in terms of sheer number of channels, but also ensuring that control is simple and straightforward. With improvements in audio processing power and console features, the challenge is to maintain speed of operation, and easily accessible controls on an increasingly powerful product. Jenkins: The general
worldwide commercial climate. Luckily, we have a very distributed client base, with no specific reliance on a single area for the bulk of sales turnover.
thinking OB
In the second of our Roundtable discussions, Philip Stevens poses key questions to seven manufacturers of OB audio mixing equipment: Calrec, DiGiCo, Harman Studer, Lawo, Roland, Solid State Logic and Stagetec
on power, space and cost, and this technology is arguably the biggest step change in audio processing history. Calrec’s Bluefin technology was the world’s first implementation of FPGA technology for full DSP, and provided enough processing on one DSP card to power an entire mixing console running surround sound productions. Hills: Without question, the
Chris Jenkins, SSL: “The raw channel/bus count will undoubtedly increase for a given system price, as cost of DSP hardware falls”
creation of the Vistonics user interface. After 20 years of assignable consoles this was the first time anybody made a digital console that could match analogue for speed and visibility in operation. Jenkins: The chip hardware and manufacturing innovations that have allowed us to shrink down a 12U fully stuffed card frame to a single PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) card in a 2U chassis. Kenning: As digital mixers
James Gordon, DiGiCo: “We have always believed the size of a console should not limit its processing capabilities”
Kenning:Working with our customers in a difficult economic environment, especially with the strength of some currencies, such as the Yen. Krückels: Price competition is definitely one of the biggest challenges the industry is facing. Nemes: The European Song Contest 2011 broadcast from
Jim Green, Calrec: “FPGA technology is arguably the biggest step change in audio processing history”
Dusseldorf was an exciting project with four Aurus and a large Nexus network to produce the national and international sound feeds.
TVBEurope: What do you think has been the greatest innovation in audio mixers in the last five years?
Felix Krückels, Lawo: “Price competition is definitely one of the biggest challenges the industry is facing”
Gordon: The speed of use and
the ability to provide a greater number of channels and busses in line with the expansion of 5.1 programmes. The ability to de- embed and re-embed audio into a video stream is now standard practice. Green: FPGA (field-
programmable gate array) saves
have now completely replaced analogue the strongest innovations have been in huge jumps in the processing power of discrete DSP and, from a Roland point of view, the capabilities of FPGA and ancillary processors. Krückels: From our perspective the integrated routing and massive DSP capacity changed audio mixers more than five years ago. A hot topic of the last two years is the levelling to loudness. It opens a completely different approach towards handling mixes in live production. Nemes: Improvement of
control surfaces, and quick and easy operation with direct access to all parameters, together with the full flexibility of individual configuration.
TVBEurope: Clearly, space limitations are a major factor in OB vehicles. Are there any other specific considerations when it comes to consoles in trucks?
www.tvbeurope.com June 2012
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