Boston, MA (May 9, 2024)—Public broadcaster GBH has refurbished two TV production control rooms and its Fraser Performance Studio with the installation of three SSL System T consoles.
The largest producer of content for PBS and partner to NPR and PRX, GBH has integrated two new System T S300 32-fader consoles at its Boston studio and headquarters complex. The organization has also installed a System T S500 64-fader console into the control room of the facility’s Fraser Performance Studio, an approximately 1,800-square-foot music recording space that is also available for commercial bookings.
The three new System T digital platforms, which were integrated by the broadcaster’s in-house engineering team, replace desks originally installed when GBH’s complex was completed in 2007. Following the installation of the System T S300s in the TV audio control rooms, senior engineer Dan Brown reports, “We noticed an improvement in audio quality when going through the consoles.”
He continues, “Our ability to do more comprehensive signal processing, such as multi-band dynamics, limiting, gating, equalization and filtering, has increased. I removed all the analog processing in the rooms and kept the AES processing, but we haven’t used it to date, because the processing in the console can do what we need. We also enabled the fader start option for our DigiCart machines, and we tied in our studio’s on-air tally lights through the consoles.”
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In the Fraser Performance Studio, the main driver behind upgrading to the System T S500 was to prepare for a wider implementation throughout the complex of Dante networking, which has already been adopted by GBH’s TV facilities, according to broadcast maintenance engineer Sai Patel. “The biggest thing was the fact that we could change from AES3 to something modern and accessible, because a lot of manufacturers are adopting Dante,” he says. The new System T replaced an SSL C200 digital audio console installed in 2007.
The three consoles have been integrated with an assortment of SSL Network I/O, including D64, D32 and A16.D16 interfaces as well as SB i16 and SB 16.12 Stageboxes.
