Straight Sets Win For Euphonix At Australian Open

MELBOURNE
While Andre Agassi and Serena Williams triumphed on court at the 2003 Australian Tennis Open during January, behind the scenes host broadcaster Network Seven put together a championship-winning performance of their own. With the help of three Euphonix audio consoles, including two of the new all-digital Max Air systems, Network Seven not only provided exclusive Australian coverage for their own broadcasts but also delivered feeds to 25 international broadcasters. With over 300 Network Seven staff involved in technical installation and operation ‘The Open’ is the largest annual OB in Australia.
Network Seven’s host broadcasting commitment necessitated that all matches, on any of the five major courts (Rod Laver Arena, Vodafone Arena, Margaret Court, Show Court Two and Show Court Three), were constantly available to international broadcasters as separate mono, stereo and multi-format live feeds.

With a minimum compliment of 16 microphones on each court capturing FX, player comments, umpire adjudications, crowd response plus commentary, the technical challenges for both man and machine were significant to say the least. The complexity of coverage also included archive recordings of a complete audio package with commentary from each court plus separate mono ‘Full Mixes’ for network headphone feeds.
Cabling to and from the broadcast compound, which housed all of the OB vans, de-mountable huts, edit suites, offices and control rooms for Network Seven and the International broadcast right holders, consisted of around 1,000 pairs of line level Cat 3 plus fibre optic from Vodafone Arena.
Previous years had seen the three main courts being mixed simultaneously on analogue consoles with the other two monitored through a central ‘FX’ room. This had proven to be not only difficult to route, but very limiting once it was set up and operating.
"The increased system complexity made the analogue or digital decision for us." said John Hancock, Head of Technical Production, Network Seven, Melbourne. "After seeing Max Air in October last year we were confident that it had all the facilities and operational flexibility that we needed – and we were right!"
Two Euphonix Max Air systems were employed: one in the ‘FX Hut’ mixing the three main courts and monitoring the other two, and the other in a temporary on-site studio mixing the network downstream audio ‘Full Mix’ (the output from the ‘FX Hut’ plus commentary, on-site studio presenters, music and tape packages).
Those at the wheel found Max Air to be a very pleasant drive.
"For me ‘Max’ was power and control with heaps of both, it’s a wonderfully flexible, sonically accurate, intuitive broadcast mixer" said George Hennessy, Audio Supervisor Network Seven Melbourne. "Orignially we had the ‘FX’ Max Air set up with three Dolby surround encoded FX mixes, three mono FX mixes, three mono ‘Full Mixes’, monitoring for all the above plus surround monitoring for the two main courts. In addition to all this we had an urgent requirement to add another three Dolby surround encoded ‘Full Mixes’ including commentary plus monitoring and we were able to achieve this remarkably easily!"
"The downstream network Max Air was operated by people with limited knowledge of the unit, however, with a couple of days of ‘hands-on’ instruction everyone was fully confident. Throughout the whole tournament, 14 days of competition plus seven days of setup, we found the consoles to be easy to operate, easy to setup and completely stable," added George.
Scott Findlay, Freelance Audio Mixer, agreed.
"Changing routing, input configurations and buss structure on the fly became a crucial requirement this year and the Max Air and I handled it brilliantly! This is my first time on a digital Euphonix and that speaks for itself," he said.
Supplied by Technical Audio Group, Network Seven now has a total of ten Euphonix consoles, seven CS Series, in stations and OB trucks across the country, one of which sub-mixed the Rod Laver Arena, and three System 5 digital consoles in the Docklands Digital Broadcasting Centre Melbourne.
"This was the perfect opportunity to see the latest Euphonix in action," said John Hancock. "We found it to be immensely powerful, extremely flexible and totally reliable. Very soon after the System 5 was released we used it for the Sydney Olympics and we had no hesitation being one of the first to broadcast live with Max Air. It’s proven to be a rock-steady platform which is precisely what we expect from Euphonix."

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