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STAGETEC IP production at the Congress of the Chaos Computer Club

STAGETEC sponsors international hacker congress with ON AIR flex and NEXUS

Berlin, January 2019: STAGETEC, the Berlin-based manufacturer of professional audio technology, was sponsor of a fully IP-based live production at the 35th Congress of the Chaos Computer Club (35C3). Five ON AIR flex mixing consoles and six NEXUS base devices were provided for the meeting of the international hacker scene from December 27 to 30, 2018.

The Congress took place at the Leipzig exhibition center. There were presentations and workshops in five event halls dealing with technical and social topics. The live streams from these halls were mixed by the five IP-based consoles ON AIR flex in a control room. The connection to the NEXUS base devices, which were located at the FOH in each of the halls, ran over a DANTE network in AES67 mode. The sixth NEXUS was available for monitoring in the control room. The audio signals were then fed into the video stream via the NEXUS XHDI board. Afterwards, the complete live streams were put on demand on the Internet.

With its impressive network infrastructure, the Chaos Communication Congress is predestined to implement audio production on an IP basis. NEXUS and ON AIR flex offered us the possibility of implementing a wide range of requirements with only a small amount of hardware: The local separation of the ON AIR flex interface and the NEXUS base device for a central mixing control room, where signal processing is done completely in the halls, plus SDI embedding for live streaming and recording, semi-automated mixing of multiple simultaneous translations, and independent AES67 multitrack recording on an open-source basis. There were no limits to what we could do with the overall system," summed up Birte Runge and Christian Dieckhoff from the CCC's Video Operation Center. "The operation of the ON AIR flex consoles during the event, like almost everything at the Congress, was handled by volunteers. Here, the clear, simple operability of the system as well as the high flexibility in the assignment of the surface were of particular advantage. Even inexperienced operators were able to work with the consoles without major entry hurdles and were able to access them easily."