AURUS upgrade with powerful DSP
Brussels, Belgium, June 2018: RTBF, Belgium's national TV station for the French community, has received an upgrade for its newsroom, Studio 24. Seven powerful RMDQ DSP units were supplied by STAGETEC, the Berlin-based manufacturer of professional audio technology, replacing their 2005 predecessors. Studio 24 is a central control room connected to several studios from which RTBF broadcasts various infotainment programs. This newly created interconnection with multiple studios places higher demands on resources, which are easily handled by the perfomant DSP board.
Studio 24 has a second-generation AURUS from 2006 installed in a NEXUS network that can access up to 800 channels and 160 busses after the conversion to RMDQ boards. Also available are features such as loudness metering in the group and sum channels, an internal automixer, de-esser, and MS decoder.
"RTBF has been a long-time customer of STAGETEC since 1997," explains Jean-Paul Moerman, who works in International Sales & Consulting for STAGETEC. "Since then, RTBF's systems have been continuously updated without having to change the entire package. The fact that STAGETEC products from the early 1990s run smoothly in current systems is very budget-friendly for customers and a unique achievement in the industry, where competitors often offer only a much shorter life cycle for product line and service. This interoperability is bidirectional and one of our selling points."
With AURUS in use around the clock at Studio 24, careful planning was required for the upgrade. In addition to the DSP unit, the TFT screens were replaced from the console and new GUI software was installed. RTBF maintenance engineer Ludovic Tresinie reports, "It wasn't even necessary to power up the backup console for emergency use. The upgrade was done quickly and without any problems in the period between the late evening news and the first news at 1 a.m. It's a trademark of STAGETEC to adapt the systems to current developments and thus always keep them up-to-date."
