When facilitating a massive broadcast and live sporting event like the Next Gen ATP finals, play cannot be interrupted for any reason. DirectOut’s PRODIGY.MP ensured that the event stayed on air, without the possibility of failure due to lost signal. Marco Galizia, Technical Director for Next Gen ATP Finals, insists that DirectOut hardware and audio solutions are the only way to secure total peace of mind, as he discovered when utilising two PRODIGY.MP at the final of the tennis tournament for the superstars of tomorrow, held in Jeddah at the end of last year.
DirectOut’s PRODIGY.MP is designed to provide flexible I/O, dual network audio and sample rate conversions. The FPGA-based, low-latency processing provides Matrix Mixers, summing busses and channel processing. With its seamless I/O structure including network convergence capability, the PRODIGY.MP can simultaneously host two different network formats, with real-time audio exchange between them both.
The Next Gen ATP Finals was broadcast in over 160 countries and with total viewing figures of over 50 million. The audio system relied on PRODIGY.MP to provide full hardware redundancy. The built in Enhanced Automatic Redundancy Switching (EARS) provided an instantaneous automatic switch-over in the event of a failure. Considering the audio transmission and thanks to the internal latency free buffer, if needed, that switch-over would happen without a single frame being lost.
Galizia explains how his system worked during this high-profile event.
“Our signals are being broadcast all over the world. 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,” he says. “The PRODIGY.MP is the first point of redundancy. The Logic of the clock redundancy strategy, EARS, 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.”
Redundancy is built into the entire sound design, with back-ups at every point in the chain, from the mic inputs to the amps.
“The whole system has to be fault-proof,” Galizia continues. “There is a back-up for everything and wherever possible the switch-over 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 system includes two DiGiCo mixing consoles that work in mirror mode and an L-Acoustics PA system. The word clock is generated via the PRODIGY.MP and sent to both consoles independently. The PRODIGY.MPs also send audio to the broadcast and live sound networks via Dante and AVB, utilising an L-Acoustic P1 processor and Luminex switches for the arena PA. The whole system is rock solid and 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.”
After experiencing the reliability of the PRODIGY.MP whilst working on Eurovision 2022 with Luca Giaroli, Chief Solution Officer for DirectOut, Galizia quickly realised that this was a product 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.”