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PostPosted: Mon May 18, 2015 7:47 pm 

Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:54 pm
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Location: Finland
Hi!

I had a talk while ago with certain Finnish broadcaster's technical producer of certain channel (not revealing!). They are broadcasting everywhere in Finland, consisting over 30 sites, with power levels ranging from 1kW to 60kW.

We discussed about the future of their sound and tech. They are using Omnia 6 at the moment, but they are looking for alternatives in the future. Their broadcasting chain is as follows: Omnia 6 at their HQ --> Stereo audio to MPLS (not sure) network (low latency and lossless) --> All big sites (not sure how they are doing STL to smaller sites) --> A unknown system that creates MPX (stereo, RDS, some limiting to keep withing limits?) --> FM transmitter.

This layout seems to be usual within the company. Their other channel just upgraded to Omnia.9, but as you guessed, they are not using composite clipping since there isn't a Omnia.9 at each site, only at the headquarters.

The question that I asked was "how are you going to make full use of latest processing technologies (e.g. composite clipping) with this layout?". He promised find me the answer since he had no idea. As you can see, they may not be willing to buy discrete processing (e.g. Omnia.9 or 11+ which they are considering among others) to every site so I had an excellent idea to make crude plans to them to show how to accomplish this with Stereo Tool and server-grade hardware at each site to replace that mysterious MPX generation equipment and provide excellent audio to listeners. I think the solution is NOT to transfer MPX over MPLS, since there has to be different RDS parameters at every station (and EON). And injecting RDS after composite clipped MPX without RDS woudn't work?


Last edited by Modulator on Thu May 28, 2015 9:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Mon May 18, 2015 8:53 pm 
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Sure good idea is to send mpx signal in some non-lossy way or just PCM.
But as you said problem occures with RDS wich is not same for every site. However advantage is (if everything is properly tuned) you need only 1 processor of choice.
Choices are huge, how in processors also in price.
Since ST is relatively low cost, especially what it can achive, that is solution No2.
For every site you can have 1 licensed software at good box and you are done.
2 or more advantages there. You can have different not only RDS but every other settings for every site and that also include calibration for every site. If one processor hangs - all others still works.. etc.

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PostPosted: Mon May 18, 2015 9:55 pm 

Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:54 pm
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Location: Finland
Yeah, the idea of mine was to put ST box in every site and do only composite clipping there with relatively affordable hardware (since only using Advanced Clipper + Composite + RDS/stereo/pre-emph) and do the audio magic at the HQ with a processor of choice (Omnia.9, 11+ or maybe even Stereo Tool if it is the preferred option). I can't see any other more affordable way to transition to the world of extremely good composite clipping than custom hardware solution paired with Stereo Tool. Have you seen any failures with good hardware and Stereo Tool (ECC mem, decent Xeon CPU, Dual PSU, SSD, Windows 7 (?) with reduced footprint)? Is it true that Omnia is using Windows?

Still, there are things that need to evolve in ST to be ready for application like this. Such as RDS, they use EON (Enhanced Other Networks) here to trigger traffic announcements regionally over this particular channel.


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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2015 4:26 am 
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Hm, I will have to look into EOS. I just added RT+ last weekend so I am working on the RDS things anyway...

Stereo Tool at each location is definitely an option. An alternative solution would be to put an Omnia 9.sg (which is going to contain the Stereo Tool clipper) on each site, but that will cost more (less than an Omnia 9, last price I heard was a bit above $4000).

In the studio they could then indeed use Stereo Tool, or an Omnia 9, of if they have patience...

Btw: Yes, Omnia 9 and 9.sg run on Windows. There are people here who are running Stereo Tool on dozens of transmitters and have told me that they haven't had a single glitch in multiple years - you really should build a test system first and let it run for a few weeks to rule out any driver or hardware issues. If it works, you can build the other 29. Or 30, then you have a backup system (or a few).


Edit: Please let me know if they are really interested. If they are going to buy 30 licenses I can find some time to work on EOS (but I need to check what it does exactly before I can promise anything).

O, btw, it *is* possible to add RDS after the clipper, if your RDS encoder supports it. It has a small effect on the audio (slightly less effective composite clipping) but the whole RDS signal only takes up about 0.5 dB of audio so the effect should be negligable. But, having everything in a single box is easier and cheaper.


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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2015 12:06 pm 

Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:54 pm
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Location: Finland
Quote:
Edit: Please let me know if they are really interested. If they are going to buy 30 licenses I can find some time to work on EOS (but I need to check what it does exactly before I can promise anything).
Heh, I will if this miracle happens. I haven't told them anything yet, and to be honest it is unlikely that there would happen anything even if I show my idea to them. But at least i'm going to make the plans and let them know :)

The good side is that the system would cost significantly less than made with similar performance "ready made" boxes, but the down side is that there would be no manufacturer warranty or on-site support. It would also require the mentioned test system to be built for endurance tests before anything could happen. Well, here could be my "million dollar" opportunity to offer myself to make this happen and offer the support ;)


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PostPosted: Tue May 19, 2015 5:10 pm 
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Well, there are people as I said who have done it and have dozens of boxes running. While there is no manufacturer warranty, if you need an extra box you can just grab an existing pc, put a decent sound card in it and have it on-air in 5-10 minutes. That's faster than what any manufacturer can do :)


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PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 1:48 am 
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Don't forget that you can always make 35 instead 30 PCs. 5 would be ready backup for replacement ;)

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PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 12:39 pm 
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Yup, and it probably makes no difference in this case but you don't need extra licenses for those.


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PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 7:40 pm 

Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2014 4:12 am
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I don't know if this helps to the op but I've got a small network of 2 stations. 1 am and 1 fm.
At the request of a few of us on the board hvz implemented RT+ literally overnight. Hvz is very responsive to customer requests.

The way we ended up delivering our content has a low cost (mostly due to ST) but high quality. Other local stations have commented to us that our sound is extremely clean and sounds like its coming off of $10,000 + processors.

Here is what we have: Studio - Driven by simian (can be driven by any radio software so long as it follows local guidelines) -> Privatized cloud.
The cloud holds music/logs/etc......
The cloud distributes the logs to each site.
The site houses a self contained machine with an Air copy of simian outputting the signal to digital and delivering to the respective devices.
FM: Simian --> EAS --> Audio processor (omnia FM) --> converts to MPX and injects RDS into stream --> Transmitter.
AM: Simian --> EAS --> Audio processor (Stereo Tool) --> transmitter.

The only reason our FM doesn't pull off of stereo tool is I've not yet found a way to route ST through the EAS in digital while maintaining our RDS signal on MPX while keeping ST.
FYI, the AM did not have Stereo capability before ST, I owe hvz a huge hand to being the only software capable of doing this with AM.

The advantage to our deployment is that allows us to deploy media and logs to each local tower, that way if we lose link connectivity the station remains online.
If you were to deploy audio links over mpls to your transmitters you run the risk of the MPLS network going offline. We used to run a full digital STL/TLS, and then a opus stream over mpls to our towers, but we've found that if you want the cleanest quality music, you have to pull a uncompressed signal, which would take up too much bandwidth after encoding to make a difference.

Also when the mpls would go offline we had a backup machine with ST and Simian at the tower on a audio switch. Why not just eliminate on point of failure? So that's what we did.
If you deploy in a similar fashion as we did, you will also find that along with fault tolerance you can use the advanced clipper in ST, which BTW hvz has perfected. Its one of the best solutions out there.

Good luck on your large deployement. I'd take a look at how you can make it fault tolerant, that is what we did.


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PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 7:48 pm 

Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2014 4:12 am
Posts: 75
Quote:
Well, there are people as I said who have done it and have dozens of boxes running. While there is no manufacturer warranty, if you need an extra box you can just grab an existing pc, put a decent sound card in it and have it on-air in 5-10 minutes. That's faster than what any manufacturer can do :)
Quote:
Don't forget that you can always make 35 instead 30 PCs. 5 would be ready backup for replacement ;)
They're both right also. ST is a very professional product that has features of the more expensive processors and it works with higher end audio cards as well (it loves ASIO).
I still am hoping for an implementation of FMExtra that us broadcasters use at least 1 digital channel for broadcasting {hint hint hvz) but I wouldn't trade my ST implementations out for the world.


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