NBCUniversal’s Stamford Studios marked has installed a Solid State Logic System T S400 broadcast audio platform to manage broadcast audio for The Steve Wilkos Show and Karamo daytime talk shows at the 46,000sq-ft, full-service production facility (the former Rich Forum Theater) in downtown Stamford, Connecticut. ‘We’re live to tape and we don’t do second takes,’ says Rob Alexander, the shows’ freelance A1.
It’s all about the workflow for Alexander, and the mixing console needs to be fast and efficient to operate. Having been working on an SSL C100 HDS in Stamford Studios’ control room since 2013, the 40-year audio veteran says he was pleasantly surprised by how quickly and easily he could operate the new System T, which has far fewer hardware controls than the old console.
‘Because the console is so different than the C100 in appearance, certainly with the touchscreens, my fear was that the learning curve was going to be long. But it is very, very user friendly and the learning curve was relatively short.
‘I’ve worked on a lot of different consoles in a lot of different places, and I’ve never seen an audio console with just one knob on the fader strip,’ he adds. ‘One of the most important things for me is the speed with which I can access things like microphone trims. The shows are very dynamic and there is a lot going on, so I’m controlling levels and EQ on the fly.’
‘That single knob does wonderful things in combination with the graphic presentation,’ Chief Engineer Barry Minnery observes. ‘And you can also use your fingers on the touch screen to affect things, which is helpful, too. It’s all very accessible. Once you start using it, it’s honestly pretty intuitive.’
Alexander also appreciates the workflow offered by the touchscreens: ‘The fact that there are three different ways to tap on the touch screen seemed cumbersome to me at first, but then you see the brilliance of it. Even just laying out the console was wonderful, too, with dragging and dropping inputs to where I needed them. It was so flexible.
He also notes that the System T platform handles transients differently from the previous desk: ‘It started occurring to me that the transients of the guests clapping, very close to the mic, were just much sharper and cleaner and faster. The console seems to be much more responsive; the process of making an analogue signal into a digital signal seems to be quicker. It really is dramatically different. I don’t know if anybody at home watching on television appreciates it. But most of what we do here we do for ourselves anyway, because we want it to be great.’
Because Alexander often must react quickly to events on the shows, the S400 surface has been paired with two System T Fader Tiles to the right of the master section, putting a total of 64 channel faders under his fingers. ‘It can go from a whisper to a scream very quickly, so having the ability to expand the fader count when required is huge,’ he explains.
On a typical show, he manages 18 microphones with a further ten audience mics hung from the lighting grid in the studio, which seats about 120 people. ‘We shoot guests in the wings,’ he says. ‘Very often someone leaves in anger, and they’ve been known to tear off their microphone and storm off to a green room. There are shotgun mics on the handheld cameras and the cameras follow them, so those mics can save me sometimes, otherwise, I have no audio to play with.’
System T’s onboard dynamics processing provides an extra layer of control: ‘Having two channels of compression on each channel strip is wonderful because one I use as a normal compressor to level out, and then compressor two is the drop-dead, hard limiter – which I really need,’ Alexander observes, ‘It took a little bit of tweaking in the beginning to get it how I wanted it to sound, but that is a wonderful tool to have for what we do.’
Beyond the microphone inputs, there are four playback sources for rolling in tape packages, three remote guest video calls in and out, and mix minuses on those. Feeds are sent to the PA and to a producer area backstage, and also to an area where there are guests backstage.’
The System T was delivered with SSL’s SB 32.24 SuperAnalogue Stagebox and has been integrated into the facility’s existing Dante network. ‘Between the Dante network and the ability to move things around with Dante on the board, we don’t do patching anymore. And we used to split everything at the old stagebox, but now we just use that gain-compensated output out of the new stage box. It has totally simplified things,’ Minnery says.
To interface with the control room’s legacy infrastructure, the new system also includes SSL’s Madi-Bridge units. ‘I really liked the little display,’ he says. ‘It was a great way for me to troubleshoot the workflow as we were doing the switchover between consoles. Plus, they’re dual power supply, and we like a lot of stuff to be redundant. We have a second Tempest Engine, and we have a backup computer for the control surfaces. We’ve got a fair amount of redundancy, because we really can’t have downtime.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com