Second in a series.
WestwoodOne is the exclusive U.S. radio source for coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.
As one can imagine, broadcast coverage for a massive (and expensive) event like the Olympics is a Herculean task. Not only is the stage large, there are many stages and the event itself covers many days.
And this is how it began in Sochi.
But before that happened, WestwoodOne’s engineering team actually set-up the whole facility in New York at the CBS Broadcast Center and powered it up to make sure it worked. Elevations, line drawings, equipment lists, schematics in Visio and Excel were completed and scrutinized. The team knew that once everything was shipped to Sochi, unpacked, assembled and fired up they would not be able to run to Radio Shack for missing parts and forgotten pieces of equipment wouldn’t be readily available — possibly for days, if at all. Nothing could be left to chance.
According to WestwoodOne, VP of Engineering Mitch Glider, the EIC onsite in Sochi, all studio interconnects for the LAN and the Sierra Automated Systems audio router in Sochi are 25-pair Cat-5e. Custom Whirlwind remote boxes take the 25-pair Cat-5e cable and break it out to six LAN drop points per cable.
The engineering and transmission section is perhaps the most crucial link in a remote operation, especially one as massive as an Olympic Games.
WestwoodOne provided these equipment lists for the racks in the “Engineering/Transmission” area — “TX1” and “TX2” on the layout.
TX2 (left)
- SAS ICM 32 intercom
- McCurdy AMP-200 audio monitor
- McCurdy SA14023 extended range meters (2)
- SAS CR16A dual output controller (feeds McCurdy as test set)
- SAS AXC-8 master system X/Y
- SAS CPM80 eight-channel output controller
- Goldline TS1RMX audio test set
- Cisco 1921 Integrated Services Router
- ESE 188 master clock NTP-based SMPTE timecode generator
- Dell PC (SAS RCS/server module/multipanel software control)
- SAS GPI 1600 opto/relay interface
- SAS 32 KD 96 x 96 audio router TX1(right)
- PreSonus ACP 88 compressor/limiter
- Wohler LM53-8 high-resolution audio meters
- Telos Zephyr Extreme ISDN codecs (4)
- Comrex Access codecs (2)
- Telos Zip One IP codecs (2)
For teams out in the field, WestwoodOne has available eight Marantz PMD620MKII handheld Flash recorders, eight Shure SM58 handheld mics, eight Sony 7506 headphones, four Sennheiser HMD 26 headsets and four Comrex Access Portable codecs.
