Providing the Shetland Islands with its radio services, the Shetland Islands Broadcasting Company (SIBC) was established by husband-and wife-team Inga Walterson and Ian Anderson, and went on-air in 1987. SIBC serves all of Shetland and parts of Orkney on FM 96.2, with one of the most powerful transmitters in ILR. The service is also streamed on apps, a website and the likes of Radioplayer.
With completion planned for in 2016, the past three years have seen SIBC replacing all of its equipment – including the transmitter, office, UPS, studios and playout system.
SIBC had previously purchased Sonifex products, mainly HS cart machines, which remained in service until conversion to digital playout in the early 1990s. The cart machines, tapes and spare were then donated to a radio station in Kukes in Albania with additional spares donated by Sonifex.
The new studio mixing desks were required to retain a similarity to the previous desks in both footprint and operation. They had to fit in the spaces previously occupied by Studer Air2000 with minimal carpentry and rewiring so that the station remained on air throughout the changeover. The final choice was two Sonifex S2 broadcast mixers, along with two Sonifex distribution amplifiers. Anderson undertook all the installation work, while continuing his regular duties for the station.
The production desk was installed in March 2015 and went on-air in May 2015 – a Sonifex S2 small-format, modular digital I/O analogue 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 S2 provides a wide range of input and output channels, PFL/cue, fader-start operation of equipment, automatic monitor muting on mic-live, light switching remote outputs, optional EQ on input modules, gram amp input options and two main audio buses, allowing broadcasting on the PGM bus while recording on the AUD bus, with bus output selection on each module.
More: www.sonifex.co.uk
