French radio station, RMC, upgrades to Studer OnAir 3000 consoles

The third largest privately owned radio station in France, RMC, has installed a pair of HARMAN Studer onAir 3000 digital broadcast consoles to its studio production facilities in Paris.

RMC—formerly known as Radio Monte Carlo— concentrates on news and sports and heavily interacts with its listeners. This is in particular true of the stations morning show phone-in segments.

The station was founded in 1943 in Monaco. However, in 2001 it was purchased by the privately owned Paris-based NextRadioTV Group. NextRadioTV Group opened a new studio in Paris and closed the original premises in Monte Carlo.

During this move to Paris the company equipped its new studios with three of the massively successful Studer OnAir 2000 consoles. These were installed by the Broadcast Division of Studer’s French distributor, Audiopole.

The station runs two identical studios at its rue d’Oradour sur Glane headquarters. One handles the on-air programme itself, the other is dedicated to production. It was in these that RMC decided it was time for upgrade of console as well as other equipment.

“Two teams were set up to survey the market—the user team and maintenance team,” explained RMC’s Technical Director (who was deputy responsible for the project), Ruben Vicente. “Several consoles were evaluated and finally both teams decided upon the OnAir 3000.”

The OnAir 3000 is built around the same patented “Touch-n-Action” philosophy of the company’s previous OnAir 2000 consoles. It therefore provided the user with largely familiar colour GUI screens. However, this was supplemented by the completely modular desk and a new DSP engine on-board.

The OnAir 3000—which was once again installed with the help of Audiopole’s Broadcast Division Director, Jean-Phillipe Blanchard—was fitted with three fader modules which provides the studios with 18 faders to control the mics (the desk can have a maximum of 48 faders). Similarly, the external lines come from the Codecs, the telephone lines and audio servers.

“We had been very happy with the reliability and ease of use of the OnAir 2000 and the studio technicians experienced the same way of working with the OnAir 3000—with a lot of additional functionalities,” added Vicente. “For example, the talkback system to the codec lines are now handled by a Talkback Box with displays, as part of the OnAir 3000 system. This box directly remotes the routing of the console.” 

RMC are looking to incorporate further Studer tech into the studios in the future. This includes the incorporation of Studer’s RELINK system in order to link the consoles together so that sources can be easily shared between one another.