Based at Essex University in Colchester, UK, Rebel is a Students’ Union radio station run by and for the students, offering debate, education, information and entertainment to more than 12,000 listeners.
It is housed in the Creative Studios, a new section of the university opened in 2015, comprising a news room, TV studio, edit suite and two well-equipped radio studios that serve both the radio and TV studios.
Both radio studios use a bespoke Sonifex S2 mixer package, with Studio 1 focussing on live On-air duties and Studio 2 being identical as a back-up but also used to pre-record content for shows, to record podcasts and to manage the playlists.
The installation was completed by Paul Miller of Advanced Studio Projects, with Peter Coxell, a former student and now Creative Studios Coordinator at Rebel, directing the install and assisting with colleagues Gemma Brett and Louis Clift.
The S2 mixer package consisted of the S2 on-air mixer set into quality S2-Solutions technical furniture, in deep solid ash with hardwearing blue/grey linoleum surfaces. The furniture used an electrical riser system, which offers variable desk heights, allowing the students to present and work either standing or sitting at the desk, whilst also providing plenty of access for disabled users.
‘We chose to buy Sonifex equipment because we had good reviews from other universities who had worked with Sonifex before,’ Coxell explains. ‘We’ve not made any big changes, just adding a second monitor in Studio 1 and installing a second PC in each studio to access Skype and Luci Live.’
The S2 is a modular broadcast mixer, which offers digital audio quality with analogue reliability in a modular format. It has both digital and analogue input channels, together with simultaneous analogue and digital outputs. The furniture is modular, so that it can be used for a small L-shaped production or talks studio, through to a larger U-shaped on-air studio.
More: www.sonifex.co.uk
