Comrex At NAB

Vortex's life-long partner in Remote Broadcast IP Audio and Video Codecs, Talk Show Systems and really useful stuff is exhibiting in the NAB Central Hall in Las Vegas.

Comrex has designed and manufactured broadcast equipment since its incorporation in 1961. Since then, Comrex has consistently developed the most innovative technology to address the specific needs of broadcasters and create products that enable broadcasters to produce live, local, imaginative remote programming. Comrex strives to provide a simple answer to a universal broadcast need - the transportation of high-quality media to the studio from virtually anywhere, economically, at a moment's notice. As methods of audio and video transportation evolve, Comrex works to develop technology that will allow broadcasters to easily achieve creative and entertaining programming, from diverse and unique locations.

Latest in a long line of really useful devices is the EarShot-IFB which is being introduced at NAB 2018. EarShot is designed to help TV stations reduce costs and provide more flexibility for remote IFB feeds. "It needed to happen," said Chris Crump, Comrex Sales Director. "We'd visit TV stations and see banks of old telephone auto-couplers connected to expensive analog phone lines. Most other phone tech has transitioned to Voice-over-IP (VoIP), but remote IFB audio remains stuck in the last century.”

EarShot provides telephone-based live studio program, IFB and talkback audio to field-based remote broadcasts. Up to 30 users can listen to Programme Audio or IFB feeds by calling into EarShot with a mobile phone.  It can handle up to 4 programme feeds or 2 IFB feeds and users can switch between them using DTMF (keyboard) tones. For higher fidelity, smartphone apps can be used to pull the audio in studio quality.  EarShot IFB interfaces to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone circuits using the SIP protocol which makes it possible to replace up to 30 POTS lines with one simple box which can be connected to low-cost cloud-based VoIP service, or tied to a station's VoIP PBX.

"With our years of experience in putting VoIP calls on air," said Tom Hartnett, Comrex Technical Director, "it was a no-brainer to provide a simple hardware solution to the IFB problem. The folks we talked to were sick of paying for a dozen or more POTS lines to provide this function. EarShot will pay for itself within a couple of months in phone service savings alone."

Also on show will be the ACCESS-NX, latest member of the industry-standard ACCESS family of IP Audio codecs, providing reliable low-delay audio using CrossLock multi-streaming over the public internet.  A new NX-Rack studio unit is also being announced which has analogue, digital and AES-67 Dante interfaces for audio together with a multi-channel NX codec which supports numerous instances of industry-standard ACCESS in a 1-U enclosure.

Comrex's ultra-low delay video codec LiveShot is also on show, providing bi-directional HD (or composite) plus stereo audio to-and-from the studio – plus a Comms channel – with built-in multi-SIM bonding, multi-streaming and diversity, all as part of the package.

For more information and to arrange a demonstration, please contact Vortex, which has worked with Comrex since 1982 and normally holds stock of most things.  It also has a number of its own add-ons to provide additional capability, including HotSwitch which lets users connect a number of remote Comrex OB codecs to one Studio codec to listen and switch between them to "go live" which is ideal for football and election roundups.  Also available is MCC Multi-codec control that lets users monitor and control all the Comrex codecs in their fleet – and CallMe Click-and-Connect that puts guests on-air without the need for them to download special software, connecting to the existing codecs in the studio. 

This article is also available in the April edition of Broadcast Film & Video.

vtx.co.uk