The stars are aligning for a new era of immersive audio in storytelling. Audiobook sales are steadily growing, the popularity of non-musical audio in personal podcasts is exploding and immersive audio technology is making compelling audio cheaper and easier to produce.
What’s old is new again. An ironic confluence of interrelated events — one that brought ribbon microphones to the front and center of broadcasting in the 1930s and to seemingly lose favor in the 1960s — is back again after 85 years.
Point to point connections with well-designed standards have given broadcaster engineers piece of mind for many years, knowing when they connect one AES-3 audio output to an AES-3 audio input, the two will connect seamlessly and audio will pass without incident. The same can be said of MADI and analogue twisted pair. Signal routing is easy to follow using numbered cabling and system diagrams.
As broadcasting moves to highly efficient production lines of the future, understanding business needs is key for engineers, and recognizing the commercial motivations of CEOs and business owners is crucial to building a successful media platform.
Snell Advanced Media (SAM) has announced that Broadcasting Center Europe (BCE) has gone live with its end-to-end IP infrastructure at RTL Group’s new Luxembourg headquarters, RTL City.
With recent events in mind, IP-Security has jumped to the top of the queue once again. The world’s biggest cyber-terror attack wiped out hundreds of thousands of computers and many more critical files, causing chaos in train terminals, the health service and institutions alike.
Broadcast engineers have a whole plethora of tools available in their kit-bag to integrate systems. The common denominators are SDI, AES and MADI for media exchange, serial and ethernet protocols for control, and the trusted GPI should everything else fail.
Using microphones during extreme weather conditions is sometimes unavoidable. When this happens, there are certain things every audio recordist needs to know in order to capture good sound while protecting the audio gear.