Ten days of intense competition saw 140 records fall at the recent Commonwealth Games, where 4,947 competitors from 71 nations took part 261 events – all broadcast to an estimated global television audience of 1.5bn. Sharing the Scotstoun Arena with the squash tournament, the event’s table tennis matches took place in two 2,500 seat ‘show courts’, and a further eight match courts. The broadcast of these was handled by Arena Television, with Audio Guarantee Engineer David Harnett taking charge of the company’s OB14 mobile with its Lawo digital mixing and routing systems.
Harnett joined Arena TV around three years ago having previously worked on Lawo consoles, which he regards as ‘very intuitive’. OB14, meanwhile, has come to sports broadcasting from use on Arena TV’s music events. The truck’s Lawo console provided the central routing hub for both of the ‘show’ tables – dubbed Table Tennis 1 and Table Tennis 2 – with one DSP core used as central router for both. Specifically, there was a 56-fader Lawo mc266 MkII console serving Table 1, with a Studer Vista digital console hooked up as a submixer to cover the action on Table 2 – both tables being in use simultaneously and requiring their own audio feeds.
Although the players were not as mobile as track athletes and the ball was not tracked as other court sports are, extensive miking of the tables called for a surprising number of console channels.
As the tables were adjacent, the same four microphones provided crown noise. Each table then used four further mics as ‘near’ and ‘far’ left-right pairs, with two electret condensers on the nets and a pair of near-far Sennheiser 416 shotgun mics to pick up foot squeaks. In addition, there were mics on the umpire and coaches for each match, giving a total of ten mics on each table.
‘In preparation, we had to set all the signal paths in and out of both tables to go through the Lawo, because of the large amount of Madi and I/O required,’ Harnett explains. ‘We basically made the Vista a slave on a Madi stream, so all the brunt of the work was being done by the Lawo.
He emphasises the the ‘large amount of I/O and lots of Madi streams’ required to support the use of the second console: ‘We also used different banks and layers to be able to have Table 2 at our fingertips if needed,’ he says. ‘It was also from this bank that we controlled all the mic amps being used for Table Two. We used EQ recall and save for quick commentator turnarounds. In addition, the Lawo’s multi-row metering was very useful, as we had a lot of outgoing lines and feeds and to be able to see these on a second metering row made life a lot easier for us. Lastly, the snapshot function was essential in getting the desk into different modes of mixing quickly for changes of operator.’
Taking a more general look at Lawo systems from a broadcast sound operator’s point of view, Harnett underlines the value of being able to configure them to meet a wide range of requirements: ‘They are extremely flexible, and this is useful for jobs that need to work outside of the box a little,’ he says.
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