NEP employed Glensound’s audio over IP (AoIP)-based technology as part of this year’s Wimbledon outside broadcast.
The OB company used Glensound’s single-commentator Inferno unit while maintaining social distancing between the commentators and summarisers.
“The Wimbledon commentary booths are quite confined spaces but we’ve been able to accommodate commentators in different locations, each with their own Inferno unit,” said Neville Hooper, deputy head of sound at NEP. “That would have been complicated with an analogue system because of all the cabling but Inferno is scalable and multiple units can be connected on a Dante compatible network. This makes for easier and quicker rigging, based on Power over Ethernet and CAT5 connections, as well as making social distancing easy to achieve.”
Other Glensound equipment used at the All England Club included the Paradiso, which can accommodate up to three commentators and features both Dante and the AES67 interoperability protocol, and the DARK88 breakout box for producing analogue outputs from the Dante network.
Commenting on NEP’s use of the Inferno system, Marc Wilson, managing director of Glensound, said, “We have a long-standing user-vendor partnership with NEP and are pleased that their use of our Inferno commentary system has allowed them to provide a simple way to comply with Covid-19 restrictions for the 2021 Wimbledon broadcasts.”
“We would not go back to analogue systems and will carry on with Inferno because it offers a perfect and straightforward way of building a network-based commentary environment,” adds Hooper. “On-site complexity is massively reduced from the days of copper cables and XLR connectors. With Inferno we are using fibre networking and switching, which vastly improves connectivity. The way this year’s Wimbledon has worked validates our investment in this technology.”
