Big Routing Systems for News Studios
Audix Broadcast have supplied a series of specialised routing and control systems for the British Broadcasting Corporation's new News and Current Affairs Complex at Television Centre. The centre is commonly referred to as the "Stage 6" development.
The equipment included a set of control panels specifically configured to accommodate the needs of a sports, news and topical programme formats required in large networked studios.
While each studio had a number of sub systems the overall requirement is to supply the studios monitoring, outside source return selection and control as well as input mixing matrices allowing a single audio channel to have a number of inputs mixed together for versatility and compactness.
Panel designs were confirmed with the operational staff and manufactured from the extensive range of modules available in the ARM3000 modular building blocks.
Each studio was for greater fault tolerance broken down into a number of subsystems and not reliant on the ubiquitous PC units, flexibility and configuration of the systems however was retained with the ARM EASYROUTE scripting based software, compiled scripts being downloaded to the target system though a PC serial connection.
Audio Routing Matrices, Stereo Mixing Matrices and Return talkback level control systems were all mounted in a "studios centralised equipment area" for added protection the matrices were powered from duplicate no break DC power supplies mounted at the bottom of the racks.