| Radio Installation 2005: | |||||||
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| British Columbia Legislature Hansard | Victoria, BC |
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Wheatstone G4
Surface &
Bridge Router System |
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 The Control Room - BC Legislature |
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Implementation of Wheatstone
Audio Router and G4/G3 consoles by Darell Norton In October of 2005 Hansard Broadcasting, the British Columbia Legislature’s broadcasting facility began to prepare for the installation of an all new digital television infrastructure. Part of this installation required the conversion to an AES audio system, necessitating the replacement of audio consoles in two control rooms used for broadcasting the proceedings of the Legislature and its committees. The new consoles had to handle existing analog sources, the new AES equipment, allow rapid and obvious fader source assignment, and be straightforward operationally. There was also a strong desire to simplify installation and wiring, with all actual signal routing centralized in the main rack room. There was not a requirement for a large number of fader positions; in fact this would be detrimental due to physical constraints and operational requirements. We had researched the Wheatstone router and consoles on-line, but it took trips to NAB and WABE to really appreciate the system and the console design. The Wheatstone router satisfied our requirements for a centralized solution, and was demonstrated to be very configurable. It also allowed multiple control surfaces to be connected to it by simple Cat5 cabling, which made it easy to integrate as our control rooms would not necessarily be finally completed or configured before the central racks were wired. It also would allow us to simply add another console surface if we expanded. Finally, it meant that one control room could easily duplicate the other it there was a major problem necessitating a move. However it was the console design that was the final determining factor. The G4 series was definitely an “on-air” console, meaning that operation was straightforward, controls were well labeled and laid out; it was really just a matter of punching a channel on and raising a fader to be on air! This simple interface was backed with a highly configurable routing system, but was very intuitive for an operator to use. We ordered the router, with a G4 and G3 control surfaces. Wheatstone requested information from us regarding our intended setup, and pre-programmed much of the configuration. Installation was straightforward, and the supplied software was quite intuitive. We only required tech support on one occasion to answer a question about networking setup. We decided to order a redundant power supply at a later date, as the router would be critical to our operation. The system to date has worked very well for us, with no recorded faults. The operators have found it to be straightforward to use, and very suitable to our operational method. |
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