Vancouver 2010: Swiss Broadcaster Employs Stagetec Audio Equipment for Games Coverage

Swiss broadcasting corporation SRG SSR Suisse will report 16 hours per day from the 2010 Vancouver Games and have selected Salzbrenner Stagetec audio equipment to do so.

TV Productioncenter Zurich (tpc), the production subsidiary of SRG SSR, will install two control rooms – one in Vancouver and one in Whistler – and a main switching room at the IBC in Vancouver. The small control room in Whistler will be used for skiing and snowboarding events and has a six-base-device NEXUS network. The tpc studio in Vancouver will produce all background interviews, features, and additional information. This studio will be connected to a larger control room equipped with Stagetec’s recently introduced Crescendo mid-size desk and a ten-base-device NEXUS network plus a NEXUS Star in the main switching room. Two satellite uplink vehicles will send their live reports to this control room as well.

The NEXUS base devices in Vancouver are populated with 62 SDI de-embedder and embedder boards XSDI. In addition, the NEXUS in Whistler offers another 26 XSDI boards, altogether summing up to 960 x 960 SDI channels.

“NEXUS was our first choice because we need to deal with an extremely large number of embedded audio signals simultaneously,” says Thomas Neuenschwander, audio engineer at tpc. “Thanks to NEXUS’ superior SDI capabilities we can produce all required material for our broadcast center in Zurich, Switzerland, starting with the SDI-feed we get from the host broadcaster. As a specialty this includes ready-to-broadcast material without commentary voice, which will be dubbed over later in Switzerland – [to facilitate] the four languages spoken in the small country.”

The tpc crew is quite familiar with Stagetec consoles, as the larger Aurus desk is installed in tpc’s OB trucks back in Switzerland. However, tpc elected to use the more-compact Crescendo console (which features 40 faders, 144 audio channels, and 64 busses) for its coverage of the Winter Games.

“For the games we have preferred the Crescendo over the Aurus as we won’t need the huge amount of controls the Aurus offers”, says Neuenschwander. “The Crescendo instead gives us almost the same DSP-Power in a small, easy-to-transport console footprint.”

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