Know-how

One CANTUS for All

The RTBF broadcasting corporation (Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté Française) caters to the French-speaking part of Belgium with three television and six radio channels. With its five stations in various Belgian cities, it has a total budget of approximately 220 millions Euro. The 300 employees in its Liège subsidiary produce programs for two television channels and some of the radio channels.

The problem was solved in a pretty ingenious way: rather than working with several control rooms, each with their own domain, RTBF decided to use a single control room that – being equipped with a CANTUS console – was capable of handling virtually all applications.

TV and Beyond

In Liège, RTBF as a quasi-local station provides almost everything from newscasts to show productions. For this purpose, the Liège facilities include a TV-production studio, a sound-effects studio, and a newsroom. All three of them are connected to the same control room. Since the station is housed in the large Palais des Congr ès, it also covers conferences and concert live transmission. In fact, the Palais des Congrès boasts several halls with varying capacities that are suited for concerts of the most diverse musical genres. This is a perfect environment to prove the flexibility of CANTUS.

Workhorse

NEXUS on a Long Lead

The station is currently using one CANTUS console with two NEXUS base devices in the control room, a fully equipped base device in the routing center, and three mobile base units. Via ten different connection options, the NEXUS network can be reconfigured completely ad-lib to meet the requirements of the day. Not less than five halls can be linked to the digital control room – with one little twist: permanently installed cables were not allowed in the conference hall, so RTBF was forced to use a temporary optical cable network of up to 200 m for special occasions.
This seemingly makeshift solution has several advantages: the system is even more flexible than originally planned while the NEXUS base devices can be positioned wherever the action is. Here's just one example: every year, the Spring Jazz Festival with simultaneous performances in five halls seating up to 1,000 people is broadcast live by the RTBF. The cabling system implemented by the RTBF makes this a breeze.

All Together Now

This compact but nonetheless powerful CANTUS/NEXUS system has turned RTBF in Liège into the act other TV stations would like to follow. That is only the beginning, for the experience made with the quality and flexibility of this system had the RTBF furbish its radio complex with CANTUS, too.

André Curnel, Planning and Operations Engineer at RTBF Liège:

»During the planning stage, the RTBF engineers carefully tested the CANTUS and NEXUS that were to be the heart of our new system. Countless measurements were carried out to find out about, for example, the console's signal-throughput rate and audio quality. Our technical findings proved beyond doubt that the CANTUS and NEXUS are a cut above other digital desks. This is especially true of Stage Tec's 28-bit converters. They are extremely linear and provide a measurable S/N ratio of 150 dB. When installed in a portable NEXUS base unit, we can locate them in the concert hall itself and link them to the CANTUS via an optical connection. This approach does away with long interference-prone copper wires, and the console can be operated at 28-bit signal quality.«