As part of its production workflow for the recent European Championships, EMG employed an audio-over-IP setup from Lawo across nine production galleries.
The nine galleries in the International Broadcast Centre (IBC), located in Munich’s Olympic Stadium, and one gallery for outside venues, were equipped with Lawo mc²56 MkIII Production Consoles to cover the audio production in the stadium (Athletics, BMX, mountain bike), the Olympia Park (medal ceremonies), Olympia Halle (gymnastics), and remote venues.
Lawo’s mc²56 enables users to share 1,024 mc²-grade DSP channels per processing core among multiple consoles. This pooling option was applied to the European Championships. Instead of dedicated audio cores, the required processing power for all mixing consoles derived from a cluster of eight shared A__UHD audio engines in a redundant setup, supporting flexible DSP assignment and reliability, added Lawo.
For an even further increased security, Docker containers in an also redundantly designed cluster of six servers hosted the mirrored software of the audio mixers. That meant if any gallery went down, the whole system stayed functional, and the audio mixing could have still been handled outside the console.
For audio contribution, the setup comprised more than 30 Lawo AoIP stageboxes of the A__line WAN capable AoIP nodes. Employed were clusters of A__stage64 and A__stage 48, as well as A__madi4 and A__madi 6 plus A__mic8 units, dedicated to tournaments and ECM events. 35 Lawo C100 blades were in use for 130 multiviewer heads.
In addition, the infrastructure for the commentary employed a total of 65 Lawo LCU Commentary Units, while Lawo-quality mic preamps and uncompressed (24-bit/48kHz) real-time Audio-over-IP ensured uncompromised audio quality, said Lawo.
Guy Haegeman, EMG’s multicam audio engineer, said: “EMG’s sports production services for the European Championships were certainly an outstanding event. Many tournaments were running in parallel. We had to cover them either in one location from different spots or in different locations. This meant that during the whole event we had to deal with an immense number of parallel feeds that needed to be monitored, switched and produced.
“When planning for Munich, we chose a networked Lawo AoIP solution with mc² consoles and A__UHD cores, providing us with the flexibility, DSP power and switching capacity we needed for our complex workflows. The cluster of A__UHD audio engines networked with all galleries also made last-minute changes in production manageable. When it became tricky, the Lawo team was always on our side to give support whenever needed!”
