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Not too long ago it was not unreasonable to argue that the ACR is wherever the mixing console is located. But now? Over the last ten years there have been tremendous shifts in production workflows, and the idea of a big, flashy, important-looking audio control surface controlling everything now paints an old-fashioned and somewhat quaint picture.

Because as more broadcasters have embraced distributed workflows and more productions are enjoying the freedom of cherry-picking whatever production collateral they need to get on air, the traditional broadcast mixing console has had to evolve to keep pace with requirements. Control surfaces and DSP processing no longer have to be located in the same physical space and can be split across multiple locations.

Everything can be virtual or physical, or any combination of both.

Distributed Production

Nobody knows this better than NEP Australia’s Michael Saliba. Having joined the company in 2001 as an engineer for Global TV, Saliba gradually moved into audio, directing and support roles. More recently he was instrumental in the design and implementation of NEP Australia’s IP Hub project, which launched in 2017 and was one of the first facilities in the world to wholeheartedly embrace remote and distributed working with its fully ST 2110 infrastructure.

Many other broadcasters and facility houses now operate distributed production models as a standard workflow, but in 2017 rethinking everything in this way was rather pioneering and a huge shift to make, and it means that Saliba has been doing it longer than pretty much anyone else on the planet.  Which is why, in part four of the Broadcast Bridge Live Sports Production themed content collection, Saliba was top of our list to ask about the hurdles NEP Australia had to overcome, and how it plans to build on its infrastructure to move forward.

The key to NEP Australia’s success has been its wholehearted embrace of IP, and it is 2110 that Saliba says is still the biggest element of the audio infrastructure. In fact, it’s the biggest part of the audio, video, connectivity, management and control infrastructures, along with anything else that the production touches. So we began by asking him what difference IP has made to the ACR.

Michael Saliba, NEP Australia: “I started my career mixing on analog desks, and while some purists might argue that we lost some fidelity when the first generation of digital consoles came in, we needed to get on that path.”

“That development and move to IP enabled us to completely change how we deliver sports production. Now, I don’t spend two and a half hours patching up my truck; I spend two and a half hours finessing my file and testing connections or taking the time to have a break before mixing a really good show because building the rig has been simplified.”

“When everything’s talking to each other in 2110, the network becomes the router, and so we always look to minimize the number of converters and gateways in the infrastructure; the biggest technology cornerstone for us now is interoperability. Everything has to be on the same plane and ST 2110 is the handoff for every piece of equipment. We don’t have a standalone router anymore because everything is a router, and it’s controlled by the network.”

“Once the network is built, control becomes our priority. Manufacturers couldn’t keep up with what we wanted to achieve in-house, which brought about the birth of NEP’s TFC broadcast control system, and we went to air with it in 2017.”

Pushing IFB To The Edge

ST 2110 opened a lot of doors for Saliba; in fact, approaching challenges from an IP-first perspective proved to be very refreshing, and in a distributed audio model where processing positions are vital to minimize latency it pays to keep an open mind. A good example of this was a development that enabled NEP Australia to embrace 2110 to implement an audio workflow that not only simplified workflows, but significantly reduced investment in additional equipment.

“We often have interstate commentary in a hub where there might be a commentary booth in one location being controlled by another, but we might need to fold in some extra resources as well. One of the things that I’m most proud of, was developing a way to create commentary positions using the internal DSP facilities in Merging’s Anubis network audio interface.”

“We worked with Merging and Sennheiser to develop an automated internal IFB system to move the IFBs right to the edge. Approaching the development from an IP perspective rather than trying to get a commentary box to do 2110 is a much easier way to work. This year we had 17 of the boxes in Singapore for the World Aquatics Championships production.”

Evolving OB Design

NEP Australia’s Hub model has also affected how it approaches truck design. With mix and monitoring positions located wherever it makes more sense for the production or personnel, processing and latency has to be flexible to meet the needs of the job. What difference does that make to how NEP Australia’s trucks are designed?

“We now operate four different models of truck which we adopt in different ways to suit different client needs. We still operate two full-blown IP, double expanding supertrucks, with galleries that can accommodate 10 replay operators and the equivalent CCU, but when we introduced the Hub we also started building rigid trucks with much smaller galleries that we could control remotely. In addition, we still have some legacy baseband trucks that we fitted with edge kits to create hybrid units to get them onto the network to deliver the same levels of control.”

“But now we’ve started building hybrid grip trucks where less than a quarter of the unit is operational technical space. It’s just as capable as our bigger trucks but they have minimal production space; for example, there aren’t replay or CC operator spaces, but just one broadcast engineer and one audio intercom support engineer. We can also use these smaller trucks as an expansion for our hubs and park them at a venue for local processing.”

In addition, NEP Australia also operates portable capture kits consisting of just three racks of equipment to further expand its hubs. For the 2023 Women’s World Cup, NEP Australia stationed these kits at 10 venues across Australia and New Zealand to bring signals directly into its hubs over IP, which Saliba says made them “just as capable as a supertruck. It just becomes a balance of how you want to manage your facilities.”

Fully Mirrored Workflow

Another big difference to audio control is that the ACR never operates alone. Adopting a full IP infrastructure across each distributed element introduces redundancy across every element, from the ST 2022-7 seamless protection switching between network nodes, to fully redundant hardware and signal control.

“We mirror broadcast consoles at both ends of the chain. Fader movement is a minimum requirement, along with AB switching and group routing, so if the audio director in the hub is moving a fader or grabbing an EQ, it moves at the other end. If an operator switches the AB input switch on either console, the source follows through because we have automated routing. The processing is the same so whatever dynamic treatment they do to the circuit is exactly the same at both ends.”

“We also control routing to ensure that the mixes and bus assignments are consistent so that something that was not meant for someone’s ear is not accidently selected. The standard setup includes 40 input faders supporting talent, routed into six groups with all of the processing except for delay. We can dial as much delay into the strip at the hub as we want, and we’re not affecting anyone.”

“All of this means that the entire mix is happening in real time at the venue and it sounds identical to what they’re doing because it’s the same processing.”

This mirroring of trucks makes NEP’s ACR allocation flexible, but with four main control rooms in Sydney and three in Melbourne, it also means that it can flip the audio gallery to completely different cities; so if there isn’t an audio director available in one location, a counterpart can mix it in an identical room in the other location. This way of working also means that consistency is paramount, and Saliba has been careful to prioritize consistent monitoring across the board wherever the mix position is located.

Monitoring

“Our clients want a consistent sounding product and across all 15 control rooms and 14 OB trucks so we stick to single manufacturers wherever we can. We need everything to sound the same whether you’re working in a control room or in an OB facility; we exclusively use Genelec’s 8030 series speakers for main monitoring and Neumann for alternates. The same goes for other equipment. We use RTW meters in our consoles and our monitor bridges are all Wohler.

“When it comes to IP, we have to treat things a little bit differently because there are many additional elements to monitor. We use Bridge Technologies Probes to monitor IP flows; we can packet capture on the fly, and we can also monitor audio, vision, and 2022-7 redundancy to make sure the flows are in time. That’s really important; in my role for a global women’s football event in 2022, as head of audio and intercoms for NEP, we covered four venues and all of the centralized workflows. There were many people QC-ing the quality of the mixes, but I used Probes to validate all of my facilities by looking at the network and listening via a web browser to guarantee the quality of all of the signals.”

The ACR can look very different depending on where it is and how it is being used, but a lot of sports coverage hasn’t changed and it still works. For rugby league, NEP Australia still uses two runners up on the sidelines; it still combines high crowd mics and lens camera mics, and it still delivers exactly what they need; the difference is that today, it is using very different tech and things like timing – which we discuss in our section on audio acquisition – is not quite as straightforward as it used to be. 

It’s All In The Mix

But sound is still paramount, and Saliba is adamant that sound is the one thing that hasn’t changed at all.

“The mix is still the priority. In motorsport, if the car is far away, I need it to sound far away and I don’t want to hear it if I can’t see it on the lens. But if it is close, I want the sound of it to blow me away.”

“That’s still the art form, and it’s still exciting. I don’t get as involved in the mixing seat as much as I used to, but when I talk to audio directors who are mixing, they are still having a ball. They love mixing and they want to capture all of the drama. For them, and for all of us - the media services and audio engineering – the mission is still exactly the same.”