NAZARETH, Belgium — I have been passionate about music, video and IT from an early age, and in the last three years working at TVV Sound Project, I have been fortunate enough to be able to use this passion in my work. What I love most about working in the broadcast industry is being part of a company that can deliver a total package to our clients.
A customer comes to us with a dream, a vision about how their radio station should look and function and we have the ability to work everything out for them and bring it to life. This can range from designing their radio studio in a 3D model, designing custom HTML pages for controlling the studio, to designing logos and website with integration of the studio (metadata, visual radio, request, social media, etc.) The possibilities are almost unlimited with the resources we already have today.
[Medialaan Renovates Qmusic and Joe Facilities]
Recently, we had the opportunity to work on such a project for Qmusic and Joe from the DPG media group. TVV has a longstanding relationship with Medialaan, and they had been using the Omnia.11 for audio processing for several years. They came to us looking to upgrade their facility by installing 11 new Omnia.9s, complete with all the trimmings of an AoIP environment. These Omnia.9s now handle all the audio processing of Joe FM and Qmusic (as well as all other channels on DAB+). We also installed five Telos Alliance Z/IPStream R/2s to handle all the station’s streams and a lot of xNodes to convert analog/digital I/O to AES67 or to be able to route and control other AES67 sources with Pathfinder. In addition, they also installed two Telos VX Engines as part of a brand new VX phone system.
All of these upgrades are monitored and controlled by two Axia Pathfinder Core PRO units. Pathfinder is being used in this facility for level detection for all FM and DAB+ channels through an HTML5 page with an overview of all channels with metering and status. If there are any errors or problems, there is a clear indication as well as instant notification through mailing. In addition they are also using an HTML5 page with maintenance buttons to adjust the Omnia.9 source (secondary source or internal player).
We always choose Telos Alliance products because we know from experience that these are the highest performance products on the market. We have replacements for all our units that are in service, but we’ve noted in practice that these must be used very rarely.
[Qmusic and Joe To Begin DAB+ Broadcasts]
During the project, it was noted that an aspect of the Omnia.9 did not fully meet customer requirements. If the internal player of the Omnia.9 was activated, it started to play from the last position in the song. We reported this to Telos Support and immediately received an answer as to what they needed to add/change to meet these customer requirements. After a few days there was already an update with the solution. Now you can have the choice to have the emergency player play a song from the beginning of a track, just like the customer requested.
Broadcast is a sector that does not stand still. The evolution from analog to digital is inevitable and cloud-based systems are just around the corner. Innovative devices such as Pathfinder that can also be run as a server application are just one of the many examples of why I’m excited to see what tomorrow can bring, and what the future of broadcast will be.
For information, contact Cam Eicher at the Telos Alliance in Ohio at 1-216-241-7225 or visit www.telosalliance.com.