Located in Eugene, Oregon, the University of Oregon’s KWVA-FM radio station has completed the renewal of its broadcast facilities using consoles and routing infrastructure from Lawo.

The project brought new equipment to the station’s studios and TOC. Four studios are now equipped with two 16-fader and two 8-fader Lawo Crystal control surfaces, powered by Lawo Compact Engines. Additionally, the TOC has a Nova 17 digital router to integrate audio sources from around the plant.

‘The Lawo Crystal and Nova 17 system fit the KWVA workflow because they can be customised to do anything,’ says Chief Engineer, Ali Abdul-Sater. ‘In a facility with more than 150 volunteerss that handles a mix of sports, news, and music programming, we really needed that ability. The slim, easy to use Crystal consoles were another key point in our decision.

‘Being part of an educational system and also providing community access, KWVA needed mixers flexible enough to accommodate, and built to stand up to, a wide variety of operators,’ adds Bill Bennett, Lawo Radio Sales Engineer for North America.

‘Control was another requirement. KWVA staff needed the ability to switch the transmitter feed between the studios on-the-fly. We helped them accomplish this by programming a switch control into the consoles’ GUI using Lawo VisTool screen-building software, which provides metering, source selection and other options for the Crystal consoles. With VisTool, the main studio switch can now be activated by touchscreen from any of the studios.’

‘The Lawo system provides the necessary flexibility and variety of functions for our diverse station environment without unnecessary user complexity,’ says General Manager Charlotte Nisser. ‘Plus they look clean, and have such a minimal footprint – just power and network cables. Such a change from our old set-up.’

More: www.lawo.com