RTS Belgrade Upgrade Studios With Lawo mc²56

RTS has updated the audio systems in five of its studios, calling on local broadcast systems integrator Amisys, and a number of Lawo mc²56 mixing systems.

Producing news, drama and sports programming for radio, television and internet broadcast, RTS is the largest broadcaster in the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans.

Operating from five studios, three of these are located in the centre of Belgrade, while two are in the suburbs. The technical upgrade was to cover all five studios.

"The studios are located in two buildings, one is in the city centre and other is in the suburb," says RTS System Engineer for Audio Technologies, Mirjana Mihajlovic, who has been with the broadcaster since 2007. "Three studios in the city centre are mostly used for live production, news, talk shows and political shows. The two studios in the suburb building are mostly used for music shows, postproduction and entertainment programs. We had old equipment, which was not able to fulfil needs of modern production so we decided to design an audio system according to our needs.

"The audio systems in the city centre studios are designed mostly for speech, and needed to be flexible, fast and reliable. It was most convenient to design systems with the same I/O and to buy mixing consoles from the same manufacturer."

For the city centre studios, RTS settled on a requirement of 24 mic/line inputs, 16 line inputs, 16 line outputs, 32 AES/EBU inputs and 32 AES/EBU outputs. In addition to this I/O, the broadcaster needed an adequate routing system, high-quality DSP and a high level of redundancy, in a package that is suited to live production and easy for operators to work with.

The two studios in the suburbs required the same feature set, but more I/O capacity and greater DSP power for working on music shows and larger productions. Again, it was decided to have two systems with the same configuration. The requirement here was for 48 mic/line inputs, 24 line inputs, 24 line outputs, 48 AES/EBU inputs and 48 AES/EBU outputs.

"As we are a public broadcaster, we needed to put out a tender for new equipment, so our technical specification was made to match certain class and capacity of professional digital audio mixing consoles. Lawo fulfilled all of our specified needs and won on that tender – so we bought five mc²56 systems for our five studios and are very satisfied with them," Mihajlovic continues. "At the moment, we are finishing the installation of the first audio system with a Lawo mc²56 console and it will be working in two weeks. Afterwards, we are going to install other four systems one after another."

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(JP/MH)