The huge IBC conference in Amsterdam had many interesting new products on offer for the radio industry and Steve Ahern walked the 11 exhibition halls and huge outdoor display area to find the most interesting ones for radioinfo readers.
IBC is bigger than the Sydney’s Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre and Melbourne’s Southbank Complex put together. Much bigger.
Hot topics at the conference and exhibition were workflow (see other article), digital radio and production systems, but there were plenty of smaller innovations worth a look as well. Here are some things of interest I spotted.
MICROPHONES AND RECORDERS
I like the HDD Flashmic. It is one of my favourite digital-recorder-microphones, but it has always bothered me that it only comes in one pickup pattern, omnidirectional.
The good news is that HDD has now added cardioid and directional patterns to the range, making them much more versatile, especially for field interviewing. One of the models has also added a line input, very handy for taking feeds from a PA system on location or from another recorder.
A rival for the Flashmic is a similar styled recorder-mic by Yellowtec. It has the same functionality as the Flashmic, although the company claims it has better battery life by combining a built in rechargeable with standard AA batteries for up to 18 hours of operation.
Yellowtec solves the pickup pattern issue by giving you three screw-on mic capsules which are interchangeable. A neat idea which gives flexibility in the field.
Sennheiser and AKG had their usual range of reliable mics, but not so much that was new to offer.
The most interesting recorders were the latest Edirol portable recorder with built in stereo mic, which has improved battery life on earlier models, and the ever-sturdy Marantz brand PCM flash recorder.
PROCESSORS
With digital radio now on air, multi-band processors are more important than ever. Processing for digital radio needs to act differently on music as it does on voice. Bad processing will make music sound full, but could make the announcer links between the music sound hollow or out of phase, or vice versa.
The best product I saw to handle this problem was the Orban Optimod, the 5300 and 6300 models were on display. The Optimod detects the difference between voice and music and alters frequency and dynamic range compression to make both sound at their best. The sales people (predictably) assured me that it worked well with the digital radio transmission stream.
DESKS
The Studer radio desk impressed me as a useful low-profile talk radio desk. You don’t see them much in Australia, but they are well used in Europe and in the South Pacific and Asia.
The ergonomics of the Studer desk fell right for talk radio and the screens are friendly and easy to read. The faders are tactile with the right amount of resistance to the finger tips, but the display model was mounted flat, while I prefer a raised mounting that makes the faders sit up a little.
For a full spec on the Studer, click here.
Studer has just won a contract from the BBC to deliver about 85 OnAir digital audio mixing consoles over the next two years. Some will be deployed in the second phase of the rebuilding of the Portland Place London HQ, where more than 50 studios are to be built for use by the BBC’s World Service and News divisions.
A huge range of other desks were on display, many of them using the latest Audio Over IP protocols.
The most interesting part of browsing through those displays was to compare the look of all the desks with one another, so scroll down and just let the pictures tell the stories.
Telos.
The Sonifex S1, a cheap, wheel out system for OBs and students. Note the cool ‘mic live’ light.
Audio over IP desk.
The popular Klotz Desk.
3D TV. WHAT ABOUT 3D RADIO?
3D TV is going to be the next big thing in broadcast media. There were plenty of 3D TVs on display at IBC, and many brands of 3D cameras.
3D TV works by taking two images slightly out of alignment with each other, then broadcasting them together. If you look at the image on a normal TV it looks blurred, with red and green colours slightly bleeding from the edges of each image, like a picture out of focus, as shown on the screen below.
If you put on 3D glasses and watch the screen, the polaroid lenses combine the images back together again, giving it 3D depth.
Everyone knows that people won’t watch TV wearing 3D glasses. It’s good for a gimmick, but unlikely to take off for the domestic market. But the news is that there are now 3D TVs being developed that don’t need glasses, and they seem to work.
The question for the radio industry, when 3D TV comes in, will be how does radio keep up with the new hype of 3D TV? By then digital radio will be so-yesterday it will just be part of the furniture and not seen as special any more.
But the potential that digital radio has to deliver surround sound, using 5.1 technology, may help radio promote some programming as ‘3D Radio’ in years to come as a way to compete with the hype of 3D TV.
Watch this space (with or without 3D glasses).
