ITV Backs HARMAN’s Studer Vista 1 as New Coronation Street Production Goes Digital

TRAFFORD, United Kingdom - The relocation of the famous ITV Coronation Street lot, from Manchester’s Quay Street Studios to the 7.7-acre studio and production facility on the Trafford side of MediaCityUK, has coincided with a significant streamlining of technology. Set in a fictional town in the north of England, what has become the world's longest-running television soap opera is a British ‘institution’, having first been broadcast back in December 1960. One of the biggest upgrades in this latest development has been the transition from an analogue mixing environment to a HARMAN Studer digital platform, once ITV had learnt that its familiar analogue surface would no longer be supported.

With AVC Electronics appointed project consultants and TSL tendering successfully for the installation contract, Coronation Street’s head of sound, Alan Monks and Coronation Street technical manager, Stan Robinson, researched the market for suitable options. But it was the show’s senior sound supervisor, Mark Cochran, who suggested investigating Studer Vista 1 all-in-one desk for each of its two new production galleries.

These were duly adopted, along with Compact Stageboxes and a Soundcraft Si Compact 16 mixing desk from Studer’s sister company Soundcraft, to provide resilience. When the order was placed by TSL, the Vista 1 became the first Studer sale to an ITV facility.

Earlier, a site visit had been arranged for the show’s leading technicians, along with AVC’s lead consultant Raz Khan, at Studer’s offices in Potters Bar. Khan recalls, “Initially we evaluated the Vista 5, and had one on demo, so we could evaluate the platform, knowing that the Vista 1 would shortly be in production. From that it was written into the specification.”

Stan Robinson added, “We realised the Vista 1 would offer more or less the same facilities and also that it was compatible with Optocore fibre distribution, which we were running right across the site, linking the five production control areas.”

The 22-fader Studer Vista 1, containing 20 channel strips and two grand master faders, provides Coronation Street with true broadcast monitoring, talkback, red light control and eight general-purpose control inputs/outputs (GPIO).

But aside from ease of use and intuitive Vistonics™ interface, one of the key reasons for choosing Studer was the superior mic preamp — an observation made after the technical team had carried out comparison tests with their own alternatives.

Stan Robinson admits that the Studer D21m mic input card, transformer balanced to all five stageboxes, had been a key driver, with Studer stageboxes transporting native MADI over an Optocore system.

Noted RazKhan, “This solution meant that the whole rigging set up became a lot simpler, with fibre out to the OB van to transport MADI and a ruggedized case housing the electronics. With DSP onboard, this fitted the bill perfectly for the budget and operational flexibility and redundancy.”

He added, “We didn't like the multi-layered menu of other desks — this was a lot easier. Also it needed to be intuitive because we have a small core of technical staff and a lot of freelance engineers using the system. It has been extremely well received.” Once a mic is plugged into appropriate input the source immediately appears on the relevant fader in the sound control room.

Speaking of the desk’s attributes, Mark Cochran stated, “You can access everything at the press of a button and EQ all your channel strips — and because the Studer stage box has option cards we were able to buy the highest quality mic amps.”

This digital format has allowed Stan Robinson to introduce a unique fibre transportation system for the signals around the site. Based on the Optocore network structure, the portable stageboxes allow signals from the studios (or anywhere else on the site) to be routed to either gallery.

Each gallery has its own stagebox, which production simply wheels to where shooting is taking place, and plugs in to the SMPTE 311M hybrid camera cable network — with 100 SMPTE sockets distributed around the site that can be patched in. Signals such as microphones, foldback, picture monitoring, video router control and talkback are automatically routed to the Studio Floor and Galleries. “In effect, the whole site becomes our studio floor,” says Stan Robinson.

Summing up he backs Mark Cochran’s endorsement of the Vista 1. “We have all been extremely happy with the decision to back the Studer platform, and it has been extremely well received.”

HARMAN (www.HARMAN.com) designs, manufactures, and markets a wide range of infotainment and audio solutions for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. It is a recognized world leader across its customer segments with premium brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, and Mark Levinson® and leading-edge connectivity, safety and audio technologies. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of 14,800 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $4.7 billion for the last twelve months ended December 31, 2013.

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HARMAN’s Studer VistaMix Breaks New Ground on ITV’s The Chase

LONDON, United Kingdom — Brought into the production for the seventh series of ITV’s popular game show, The Chase, sound supervisor Adrian Harding-Jones used HARMAN’s Studer Vista 1 digital console with VistaMix automatic mic mixing to great effect.

This was one of several innovations for the popular game show, which for this series relocated from its traditional home — the London Studios on the South Bank — to Teddington Studios. Harding-Jones’ company, Audio Design Inspiration, joined forces with Tony Revell Sound, and in addition to VistaMix, it was also the first time a Cedar DNS8 Live had been used as a mic noise suppressor on individual microphones.

Explaining his preference for the Vista 1, the television sound specialist said, “I was looking for an easy to use and intuitive desk that would easily fit into a tight control room without the need for a hard wired installation. Having all connectivity on the desk, along with the small footprint, made the Vista 1 an ideal solution.”

The integration of VistaMix available in software version 4.9 that the Vista 1 was running —proved a real bonus. “The Chase studio has a large videowall and as a result fan noise is an issue. VistaMix has enabled me to clean up the mix dramatically.”

VistaMix was designed for just such an unscripted multi-microphone live event as this, since game-shows inherently suffer from both microphone spill and background noise. As active mics are successively added to the mix, so the overall sound quality deteriorates, leading to decreased intelligibility and phase distortion.

Instead of needing to manually adjust all the faders each time, VistaMix automatically mimics the action of a human operator so that 'talking' mic gain can be increased at lightning speed while reducing gain for all others — ensuring a clean balanced mix.

Having heard about VistaMix, Adrian Harding-Jones was treated to a demo at the recent BVE 2013 expo by Studer’s Director of Product Strategy, Andrew Hills. “As a result of this I agreed to trial it — and was so impressed with the results, when offered the choice of which desk I could use for The Chase, the Vista 1 was my first choice,” he stated.

The digital console, along with all his mics, recording and sound accessories, was provided by rental company, Terry Tew Sound & Light Ltd. VistaMix immediately proved its worth, with access to the VistaMix settings and routing made extremely easy. “It is highly intuitive and follows the Vistonics logic very well. In use, the speed it offered over manual fader adjustment was remarkable — no human could make that large a fader adjustment so quickly and with such accuracy!”

“It also allows a great reduction in the amount of background noise — a huge problem in studios these days — by effectively only having the mics of people talking open,” he confirmed. “It allows quicker than human reactions when recording unrehearsed and ad lib sequences when the sound supervisor will have no idea who's going to talk next. The overall result is a better listening experience for the viewer and potentially a reduction in post production time by lessening the need for edits requiring noise reduction.”

Already long familiar with the Studer topography from working extensively on the Vista 5 and Vista 8 Adrian Harding-Jones mixes eight radio mics, three stereo channels of music playback/grams and two channels of VT on The Chase. A further 15 channel sends to VT allow sample accurate timing of all elements being recorded.

The Vista 1 itself is configured with 32 analogue line ins, 32 analogue line outs (some assigned to monitoring), eight AES ins and outs and 64 channel optical MADI in and out. Harding-Jones also specified a Studer D21 AES card — to provide a further eight AES ins and outs. With three shows recorded each day, it endures a heavy duty cycle.

Summing up, Adrian Harding-Jones notes that: “The Chase keeps all dialogue firmly in the centre of the stereo image,” and points to the ability to ‘weight’ the main presenter as being one of VistaMix’s main attributes. Explaining this, he says, “When everyone is talking, which often happens on lively panel shows, the weight control always allows the presenter to cut through the noise.

“I see this being a very useful tool in future and already have other projects I would be interested to start using VistaMix on.”

VistaMix is part of the new V4.9 Vista software, and is available as an upgrade for existing console owners, who should contact their Distributor for more information and system requirements.

HARMAN (www.HARMAN.com) designs, manufactures, and markets a wide range of audio, lighting and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. It is a recognized world leader across its customer segments with premium brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity9, JBL®, Lexicon®, and Mark Levinson®, and leading-edge connectivity, safety and audio technologies. The company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with Harman audio and infotainment systems. Harman has a workforce of about 14,300 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $4.4 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2012.

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