TSL provides safety net for Shanghai Media Group
Published: ASIA
CHINA: Shanghai Media Group (SMG) has recently taken delivery of five TSL Professional Products dual Touchmix combo systems to act as backup solutions for five of its television production studios’ main audio consoles. SMG operates 14 television channels and 11 radio stations serving the Shanghai megalopolis, bringing diverse programming, sports and news to an audience of 1.6 billion.
SMG will use the Touchmix combo systems as a safety net for its 24-hour news operations. Each of its production studios is outfitted with a high-end digital audio console, with an associated audio engineer.
The rack-mount Touchmix’s are located in the production room, where the technical manager can make configuration changes, freeing the audio engineer to use the desktop Touchmix Pilot to send the audio to air in the event of a main console crash.
In the event that the primary audio console should fail, the parallel-configured Touchmix combo systems will take over the audio tasks for the programme in production within seconds.
‘The solution that SMG were looking for represented a significant engineering challenge for us, but one that enabled us to deliver very positive results,’ explained Martin Dyster, head of audio for TSL Professional Products Ltd. ‘SMG wanted to combine the standard rack-mount Touchmix unit and the desktop Touchmix Pilot remote into a system where in the event that they lost the main audio console, its sound operator could keep the show live via the simple Pilot system with the tech manager providing configuration support via the rackmount unit if required.
‘Our R&D team paired the units in a master/slave configuration and wrote new code to satisfy SMG’s requirement, resulting in an entirely viable solution that is relevant to many other applications/environments. In time honoured fashion mimicking the evolution of many TSL audio monitoring products, the Touchmix Combo was born from a customer’s vision,’ he explained.
The main ‘host’ Touchmix AVM-T-MIX unit comprises two 20-channel audio mixers, each configurable as a combination of assignable stereo, mono or even surround input channels per mixer. The 22:9 aspect ratio touchscreen front panel provides volume control, a dual-function gain/balance encoder, headphone socket, USB port, home preset save/recall switch and loudspeakers. The Touchmix AVM-T-MIX Pilot comprises a desktop remote touchscreen panel with a rack-mount host unit. The two-unit combination packages for SMG are interconnected via Ethernet.