D2N and Calrec power Nine Network’s ‘any signal — anywhere’ philosophy
As a regular user of Calrec products, Australian broadcaster Nine Network turned to Calrec’s Australian distributor and reseller, D2N – Technology Solutions, to upgrade their portfolio of Calrec solutions for their coverage of the Summer Olympics in Paris.
Shaun Zuccolotto, Nine Broadcast Tech Support Engineer – Communication & Audio specialist, explained, “Nine’s philosophy is all about interconnectivity. This not only applies broadly to the connectivity that we have between our eight bureaus across Australia and our LA branch; but also goes down to infrastructure level whereby we require our devices and systems to interconnect between one another with great flexibility, ease and reliability.
“The Calrec approach of providing connected audio signals and pathways across multiple studios and control rooms allows for that methodology that Nine desires to be ensured and maintained to the finest detail and highest level.
“As such and to complement this, D2N was the right technology partner to help us with our recent Calrec upgrade.”
The upgrade saw Nine purchasing two Calrec Brio audio mixing consoles from D2N to add to its existing Calrec ecosystem. These consoles were specifically purchased to handle the Olympics’ broadcast coverage by handling 82 distribution feeds (DX) and facilitate the curation of 24 contribution feeds (CX) by adding Nine’s own commentary from 13 commentary booths across Paris and five commentary booths in-house from their HQ at ODS.
Nine run three control rooms, seven studios and six off-tube booths in their Calrec ecosystem. Calrec stage-boxes carry the audio signals to and from the various handoff points across their studios on multiple floors and their data centre. They then process the audio at any of their five Calrec consoles and pass these audio signals to air or to their ISO record units for broadcast purposes.
“Having migrated into the IP domain, we are able to tie into our Production Media Network (PMN) using 2110-30 signals that allow for flexible and powerful audio routing making our philosophy of ‘any signal – anywhere’ so much more achievable.
“We are a fully compliant 2110 IP facility and have the power at our hands to route audio to any floor in our multi-story building across IP domains using Layer 3 routing with ease. We really have entered into a world of unparalleled processing power and DSP functionality with our Calrec ecosystem,” Zuccolotto concluded.
