ETB installs an advanced Riedel communications infrastructure

Supplied and composed of CROSSPOINT, the Artist solution allows ETB to now have flexible intercommunication communications throughout the miramón installation according to the needs of each production.

The Basque Public Broadcaster Euskal Irrati Televista (ETB) has deployed an intercom system based on the digital matrix Riedel Artist inside his main production center in Miramón (Donosti-San Sebastián). Supplied and composed of Crosspoint, the artist solution allows ETB now to have flexible intercommunication communications throughout the Miramón installation according to the needs of each production, in addition to voice communications on IP with the central headquarters of the autonomic in Bilbao.

Juan Carlos Loroño, head of the ETB production centers, admits that “we evaluate a wide variety of solutions and integrators, and finally we offer ourselves for the Riedel and Crosspoint artist system for offering us the greatest benefit and the highest quality. Since we put the artist system in operation, we are very satisfied with its abilities and its impact on the day to day of our work in Miramón”.

The Artist solution at the ETB Miramón Production Center offers a distributed and decentralized architecture, scalable for all communications. The 160 × 160 port Riedel intercom system consists of the artist 128 and artist 32 with 56 ports configured for different control panels, 80 ports for four -wire analog audio, eight ports for the use of VoIP, and eight ports for a party system. The entire system is configured under AES3/EBU standard, with level controls at each crossing point individually, connections without blocking and power supplies and redundant controls.

Artist units are complemented with 46 control panels of the 2000 LCD series, a PCC-116 commentator control panel, 10 Belt Pack with cable and several VoIP multiplexers. For sporting events that occur from Miramón, the commentator panel admits two positions working in the same language or other configurations in several languages.

System configuration

The Riedel director software facilitates the system configuration, as well as its monitoring and control, with an intuitive interface that simplifies the entire configuration, however complex the adjustments are.

While the remote configuration functions allow control from Bilbao on weekends when there is no technical personnel in Miramón, ETB also has the option of having a partial configuration of the system allowing users to load and save configuration files in just a part of the system without affecting the communications carried out in other areas of the production center.

Juan Olde, Technical Coordinator of the ETB Production Center in Miramón, stressed that “the ability to change the configuration of a production study without affecting the configuration of another production is very important. This flexibility allows to carry out multiple simultaneous changes necessary in the daily preparation of a program and save them in partial files that are organized by the type of production, available personnel or operating model”.