The AEQ BC2000D Router at Radio Gaucha in Brazil
Brazilian regional media group Radio Gaucha has refurbished its main studio facilities with AEQ digital equipment. They have added four new on air radio studios and one new master control room.
This project was coordinated by RBS Engineering Department in collaboration with the technical services of AEQ-Madrid and their technical staff sent on location to Porto Alegre in Brazil.
Two radio studios are based on AEQ Arena digital audio mixers with 35 motorized faders set in the control surface and a redundant power supply, offering 24 analog inputs/outputs, 24 digital AES inputs/outputs and eight microphone inputs. The third on air studio uses another AEQ Arena digital mixer of 15 faders. The remaining radio studio is equipped with an AEQ Forum digital console that includes a 12-fader control surface with 16 analog inputs and five mics. There is also a fifth Arena mixer available as a backup for all of the studios.
The master control room was designed to work with an AEQ BC2000D digital central router that includes a seven-chassis core interconnected using multichannel optical fiber links — 260 analog in/out, 96 digital AES in/out and 12 microphones. All the radio audio signals in the central facilities of Radio Gaucha are managed by the central digital router, so AEQ equipped this system as 100% redundancy, including dual control modules in all the nodes, dual power supplies for all of the chassis and numerous DSP processors for backup. Control of the AEQ BC2000D router is decentralized via PC distribution in the studios, as well as from 14 AEQ NCB100 XY panels for quick local access. All interfaces are controlled by passwords associated with different user profiles and access levels.
The connections between new digital on air radio studios and the central control router were designed using MADI (AES10) links over dedicated optical fiber, allowing each of them to transport up to 64 independent audio channels (with AES3 digital quality), so the audio signals in any of the studios can be sent for analysis, operation, processing or distribution throughout the building.
AEQ completed this project with additional AEQ accessories such as monitors, signaling equipment, AM/FM receiver and prepared cabling configurations.
