BVE 2012: Digico makes debut appearance with dedicated broadcast consoles

Today (February 14th) marks Digico’s debut appearance at the annual Broadcast Video Expo (BVE) as the British digital console manufacturer heads to London’s Earls Court to showcase its new broadcast specific SD7B, SD10B and SD11B mixing desks.

The multi-application approach of Digico’s SD Series, which is based on FPGA technology and Stealth Digital Processing, has enabled it to develop application specific feature sets, resulting in dedicated broadcast versions of its SD7, SD10 and SD11 consoles.

“We have a heritage within the broadcast industry from our Soundtracs days,” said Digico’s managing director, James Gordon. “It’s exciting to be back with a set of consoles that address the entire scope of the broadcast market’s needs.”

Based on the flagship of Digico’s console range, the SD7B is designed to offer the routing capacity, processing ability and user interface to serve the most complex broadcast audio productions. In addition to the standard console’s feature set, it can handle up to 996 simultaneous optical plus 224 MADI, 24 analogue and AES/EBU connections. It can run two high speed Optocore loops, with any combination of 448 inputs and outputs on each loop and all at 96KHz, while the local I/O connections are suited to fast outside broadcast setup before setting up the racks. Backstop PFL is available on each channel, while 256 dynamic EQ processors are available on any input or output on each band of EQ, as are 256 multiband compressors, also available on any input or output. 48 simultaneous internal Stealth digital effects, from a palette of 33, are also provided.

With a broadcast specific feature set, the SD10B offers multi-channel ‘folding’ under a single fader, which is designed to allow users to configure stereo, LCR, 5.1, or up to 11 mono channels under a single fader strip that can be unfolded for individual control, or folded up for convenience and efficient work surface use. Additional features include 37 x 100mm touch sensitive faders, which include 96 with full processing, 12 of which can be configured as full Flexi Channels – and outputs that can be assigned across the surface. All inputs have dual mono inputs for quick ‘Main’ and ‘Alt’ channel switching.

New for 2012 is the SD11B, which is designed for use as both a desktop console or mounted in a 19” rack.

Each of the dedicated broadcast consoles are compatible with Digico’s SD Rack, which serves as a multi-sample rate signal splitter that also allows the Digico microphone preamps to replace the standard mic preamps of an analogue or other digital console. Digico HD-SDI cards also allow users to de-embed and re-embed any combination of up to four of the available eight AES3-compatible streams per I/O module, while Gain Tracking and splitting is also available.