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RADIO STUDIO
POST-PRODUCTION MIXING ROOM
BROADCAST CENTRE
transition for any communications requirements between the old and the new building . The ADAM frame and Trunkmaster will eventually move to the new building . We also have a mesh of more than 40 Riedel Bolero antennas throughout the new building to cover wireless communication across control rooms , studios , newsroom , atrium , elevators , and other technical areas .”
And regarding the new production centre ’ s wireless microphone system , there were two main objectives . “ The first
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was to follow the centralization design principle , which mandates the installation of the majority of the equipment in the central equipment room . The second one was to do zoning and have a pool of equipment accessible to all control rooms with coverage on every single studio . We had to send signals over fibre around the building to be able to achieve this distribution ,” explains St-Pierre . “ Although we have put a lot of effort into designing the RF infrastructure – choosing the right equipment for our needs , amplifiers , filters , antennas |
, etc . – the key to an effective RF system remains coordination and planning , which are very well taken care of by our team of technicians and engineers .”
For this , there are two centralized pools of wireless receivers — one for entertainment and one for news production . The entertainment pool includes nine Shure Axient AD4Qs receivers ( 36 channels ) while the news pool includes seven receivers ( 28 channels ). Each pool also includes a Shure AXT600 frequency manager that manages automatic backup frequency switching in case of any interference and adds additional resiliency . As well , there is RFover-fibre transmission between the central equipment room and telecom risers across the building . From there , there is antenna coaxial distribution using low-loss cable .
Additionally , there are eight Wisycom ADFA and LFA active directional and omni antennas within the three entertainment television studios and a half-dozen more in the news studios . “ Each one of them is filtered directly at the antenna to minimize noise at the input of the system and protect the fibre-optic frontend ,” St-Pierre notes . He adds that there are a dozen of Shure ’ s AD610 ShowLink wireless access points spread across the many studios for microphone control . “ We also deployed 10 virtual machines , reachable from our network to deal with microphone control using Shure WWB6 Wireless Workbench .”
The IFB system for the three main news studios is a pooled system with a distributed set of antennas . “ We use a passive set of filtering , combining two 50-watt RF power amps ,” continues St-Pierre . “ Oversizing the RF power amps was a crucial step while designing this system since it is not necessarily easy to deal with digital RF carriers in transmission like we did , especially when it comes to a distributed system . This allows us to cover the entire news production floor with IFB signals , and thus , the talent can walk from studio to studio without any interruption .”
For the three entertainment television studios , St-Pierre says the IEMs / IFBs are managed locally for each of the studios without any distributed antenna system or control . They are fed by Lawo Power Cores with 24 channels of Shure PSM1000 to serve all three studios .
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In the post-production department , in the four 5.1 audio mixing rooms , it ’ s a fairly straight-forward Pro Tools-based setup with Avid S6 M40 control surfaces . Aside from being an industry standard , the choice to go with Avid was also about continuity between the old and new buildings and other CBC / Radio-Canada facilities .
“ Everybody ’ s used to it , we have the backend infrastructure for it , and it ’ s not only for Montreal , but it ’ s across Canada . So , it ’ s the ease of training and maintenance and spare parts and everything ,” notes Dumont . “ Staying with [ Pro Tools ] was actually one of the few parts of the project where we were able to stick with something that we knew . That was a good thing , probably , because starting from scratch for everything and people having to familiarize themselves with IP networks and troubleshooting things differently , it ’ s not that easy . So , it ’ s probably a good thing to have some base of things that you can keep and know .”
On the radio side , one of the most unique and challenging aspects of this project was how quickly the 13 studios and 15 booths had to be designed and built . There was just one year to get it done . On top of that , resources and manpower were stretched thin , with only two engineers , one operations tech , one maintenance tech , and three wiremen available to get the job done on schedule .
Typically , Dam explains , they would tackle each radio studio as a separate project with its own unique specifications . Doing that , though , would normally take five to six weeks per studio to get it ready , plus an additional week of testing , training , and so on .
“ So , we sat around a table and brainstormed , ‘ How can we shorten the installation and also do it better ?’” recalls Dam . “ We proposed categorizing them into four types of studios ; like Studio Type A for the big shows , Studio Type B for news , and so on , and we also did this for the booths .”
In each radio studio type , everything would be identical , right down to the number and placement of cables . This way , once the first studio of a specific type is done , it can be replicated quickly . “ It speeds up the installation a lot , and also the delivery and the workflow . Everything in the process , like
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34 PROFESSIONAL SOUND |