ITN News Digital Radio Studios
Kingston TLI have recently installed 2 digital on-air radio suites at the ITN new 24 hour digital news services originating from the London Headquarters. The Audix Broadcast ADD7000 series consoles were chosen for their fast, intuitive control surface, exemplary technical specifications and unparalleled flexibility. These features have been further extended through the addition of a brand new audio and control matrix system which integrates the studio suites to provide a high degree of on-air security as well as remarkable system flexibility.
ITN's new radio news suites have been designed with full operational redundancy, including the ability to swap desk control panels very quickly, or control the mixers from the processing rack itself, in an emergency. Any console has the ability to broadcast to air and there is a back-up analogue router in addition to the main digital one.
Each studio installation incorporates Audix Broadcast high quality microphone preamplifiers as a front end for a Yellow Tec microphone processor, controlled remotely from the console faders. The unit premises presenter and guest microphones before despatch to the console processing. All of the console's six line input channels have two selectable inputs and these are arranged to provide considerable operational flexibility whilst maintaining a simple control interface.
For example, two OS channels can provide either an outside source (preselected from ITN's main station matrix) or a telephone circuit (both analogue and ISDN are catered for). Unusually, each of these outside sources has independent but permanent return circuits, switched automatically from cue to cleanfeed when the relevant source is selected and faded up on-air. The remaining four dual-input line channels have integral sample rate converters and accommodate digital replay sources including two stereo Dalet channels and various local replay machines. Integrated play/stop machine control facilities are provided and a separate meter bridge incorporates both mono and stereo PPMs in addition to remote control facilities for the on-air Transmission Matrix in the familiar 'offer-take' format.
