Rental provider Gearhouse Broadcast rolled in nine Lawo mc²56 audio mixing consoles, 21 Lawo V__pro8 video processor units and a Nova73 HD router for the broadcast of the first big international sports event of 2015 – the Australian Open tennis tournament. In addition, more than 40 Bel Digital units were part of the set-up, including the new BM-A2-64Madi Madi monitor.

Lawo staff were on-hand to support Gearhouse Broadcast in setting up and commissioning the Lawo systems. Of the nine mc²56 consoles, five are networked via a Nova73 HD to provide sound feeds for host broadcaster, Tennis Australia. Four of the mixers managed sound from the Rod Laver Arena, Hisense Arena, Margaret Court Arena, and Courts 2, 3, 6 and 8.

A further mc²56 provided the world feed for the rights holder. All stageboxes were interlinked by the central Nova73 router, and are assigned via access rights management to the respective audio control rooms. The mixed 5.1 surround signal was send to the V__pro8 units for embedding.

‘The build of a system that had distribution flexibility was key for us during the design process and is why we chose to network the system,’ says Gearhouse Senior Audio Engineer, Nick Bowey. ‘There were several surprises on the courts during the early days of the tournament and the technical infrastructure really held its own – as expected.’

‘The inherent resilience of the networked system provided us with ultimate control of signals on the fly by use of extended matrix capability across six systems,’ he continues ‘We have also been able to provide a set of complete backup control rooms through the distribution and duplication of these networked signals. Host broadcaster Tennis Australia is highly satisfied with the set-up and its built in redundancy, and the operators love working with the Lawo consoles’.

Gearhouse has also supplied an additional four mc²56 mixing consoles to rights holders ESPN, Tennis Channel, Channel 7 and WOWOW. One of the large installations was that for local broadcaster Channel 7. The console in use here was a 48-channel MkII fitted with an additional 16-channel fader module, all of which were fully used on every layer with the channels from five DSP cards. The console is operated in Split Mode, with two separate monitoring outputs.

Part of a vast Madi network, Gearhouse Broadcast purchased Bel Digital BM-A2-64Madi Madi Monitor to provide assistance with the installation and smooth running of the Lawo consoles and associated stageboxes, which were connected via a central Madi router.

Crucially, the Madi Monitor was used extensively during configuration and setup of the system prior to the event, allowing the Gearhouse team to check the quality of the large number of Madi streams installed. With its ability to analyse the status information within the Madi streams, it quickly helped in identifying any potential issues before they became a problem. This provided the Gearhouse team with a high level of confidence: ‘We provided our customers with a very resilient audio network for the Australian Open,’ says Gearhouse COO Kevin Moorhouse. ‘The Bel Madi Monitor fulfilled its purpose well within our MCR area.’

During the event, the Madi Monitor was located in the Central Engineering Office and connected back to the central audio router. Throughout the tournament, it was again used as a confidence monitor to check the audio content of the Madi streams: ‘Bel’s Madi Monitor provided two very critical and different functions prior to and during the Australian Open,’ says Bel Digital’s Barry Revels. ‘This is something no other unit is capable of doing.’

Gearhouse also used over 40 Bel Digital 1U BM-A1-2SHD and eight new BM-A1-16SHD audio monitors, to provide reliable and easy-to-use audio confidence monitoring throughout the broadcast facility.