Stagetec Consoles Return to Eurovision Song Contest

The Eurovision Song Contest distributed the Grand Final competition out to 120 million TV spectators in Europe last Saturday from a mobile broadcast centre at the Dusseldorf Arena featuring Stagetec AURUS sound control rooms. Four large scale AURUS consoles provided the international sound feed.

“As ‘official supplier’ and partner of German public broadcaster NDR, Stagetec is providing all the mixing consoles used to broadcast this year’s contest,” said Dr. Klaus-Peter Scholz, Managing Director of Stagetec Berlin.

Four AURUS consoles with 48 faders and a full complement of DSP were on site. Three were installed in mobile control rooms the NDR has set up on the Esprit Arena campus, the fourth was in one of NDR’s HD outside broadcast trucks. In this set-up two of the four sound control rooms performed all mixing of the broadcast sound. The first provided the music mix and passed its output to the second, which produces the international sound feed. The third and fourth sound control rooms acted purely as backups and were therefore equipped with identical hardware and able to take over seamlessly in case of any failure of the main system.

Each control room had its own NEXUS network to allow it to operate independently of the other NEXUS networks. However, the four NEXUS systems also exchange their audio data via MADI to form a single audio network for the entire TV compound. “The whole installation is planned for maximum reliability by NDR,” said Scholz.

As is now normal for international events, the sound feed was produced in 5.1 and stereo simultaneously. This is why the backup consoles featured the same abundant DSP capabilities as the main consoles. The signals from the broadcast centre reached more than 120 million spectators across Europe via more than 40 networks.

The combination of AURUS and NEXUS has been deployed for many major events from previous Eurovision Song Contests to the Olympic Games in Athens and Beijing.