Broadcast a live sporting event like the Next Gen ATP tennis finals is mission critical – play cannot be interrupted for any reason. The event’s Technical Director Marco Galizia insists that DirectOut hardware and audio solutions are the only way to secure his peace of mind.
‘Our signals are broadcast all over the world,’ Galizia explains. ‘When the referee speaks, it is only for a few minutes. If there is a problem in this tiny window it would be a major issue – Prodigy.MP is the first point of redundancy. The Logic of the clock redundancy strategy, EARS (Enhanced Automatic Redundancy Switching) provides automated switching. If it loses clock, it will automatically switch to internal clocking and carry on. If the problems continue and you need to intervene, you can send an OSC command to the mixer and switch manually.’
The finals were broadcast from Jeddah to more than 160 countries, with total viewing of upwards of 50. The audio system relied on two Prodigy.MP units to provide full hardware redundancy with EARS management. Considering the audio transmission and thanks to the internal latency free buffer, if needed, that switchover would happen without a single frame being lost.
The Prodigy.MP units provided flexible I/O, dual network audio and sample rate conversions. Their FPGA-based, low-latency processing supports matrix mixers, summing buses and channel processing, with a seamless I/O structure including network convergence that can simultaneously host two different network formats, with real-time audio exchange between them.
‘The whole system has to be fault-proof,’ Galizia continues. ‘There is a back-up for everything and wherever possible the switchover is fully automated. The referee wears two microphones on his body, both of which have automatically switchable frequencies in case of drop out. There are also wired microphones on the referee’s chair and next to the net for the coin toss.’
The set-up also used two DiGiCo mixing consoles working in mirror mode, and an L-Acoustics PA system. The system word clock is taken from the Prodigy.MPs and sent to both consoles independently. The Prodigy.MPs also send audio to the broadcast and live sound networks via Dante and AVB, using an L-Acoustic P1 processor and Luminex switches for the arena PA. The whole system has intelligent automated switching built into every stage via the connectivity of the Prodigy.MP units.
‘The Prodigy.MP is not only providing redundancy,’ Galizia says. ‘We are managing inputs, embedding audio via Dante and finishing with the AVB cards that send audio through the Luminex switches to the L-Acoustics P1. The Prodigy.MP also converts the signal from Dante to Madi, so it can be accepted by the DiGiCo consoles.’
Having seen the reliability of the Prodigy.MP while working on Eurovision 2022 with DirectOut’s Luca Giaroli,, Galizia realised that it that revolutionised the idea of redundancy. It is not just about having a back-up waiting for something to go wrong, his system is able to detect any errors or failures and self-correct seamlessly.
‘Having done the ATP finals for three years in a row, I spoke to the hire company before the Next Gen finals and explained that it could only be done with the Prodigy.MP. It is the only system with EARS, so it’s the only machine with fully audio automated switching,’ Galazia concludes. ‘Something I have learnt over my career is that having a feature work in a live event is very different to it working under test conditions in a factory, so I like to test things for myself. The Prodigy.MP is completely stable. The EARS system and the sample rate conversion is automatic, and it works every time.’
