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24
Fleet and able to process a
staggering 1,020 paths,
Calrec’s new Apollo console is
definitely heaven-sent for
those in broadcast, says
STEPHEN BENNETT.
THE REVIEWER
STEPHEN BENNETT has been
involved in music production for
over 25 years. Now based in the
wilds of rural Sweden, he runs
Chaos Studios and writes books
and articles on music technology.
He’s also a film-maker with
s e veral m u s i c v i d e o s a n d
short films to his credit. www.
stephenjamesbennett.co.uk
When you’ve named your top of the range product
Alpha, there’s really nowhere else to go as far as
the Greek alphabet is concerned. So UK-based
Calrec has turned to deities when christening their latest
console. Apollo is based on the company’s Bluefin2 HDSP
FGPA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) technology to
provide an extended and enhanced feature set over the
Alpha – though that desk will remain in production
alongside its more heavenly named brethren. Introduced at
NAB 2009, Apollo can potentially have a staggering 1,020
processing paths, 128 program busses, 96 IFB/Track outputs,
and 48 auxiliaries. Though these numbers are lower at
96kHz, the console still retains an impressive amount of
power – and it’s available all of the time, with none of that
tedious juggling of DSP
resources common to
digital systems.
How Many?
You may be asking
yourself why anyone
would need this
number of processing
paths? Well, if you in the
broadcasting sector you won’t be, says Henry Goodman,
Calrec’s Business Development Manager. “If you’re
working in 5.1 or other surround formats, the channel
count really mounts up.” To feed these paths, Calrec’s
Hydra2 networking technology is a 8192x8192 cross-point
router enabling all I/O to be situated remotely from the
console. “Each Hydra2 I/O box can have various input/
output units that can provide various formats, such as
analogue, AES, MADI, and SDI, all with either copper
or fibre connectivity,” says Goodman. “We’ve taken the
concept of allowing for a remote I/O box that could be
situated for an Outside Broadcast application or placed
down on the studio floor wired by Gigabit Ethernet, and
moved that forward to its next level. This has enabled us,
alongside the DSP technology, to develop our own router
technology, and each console can be incorporated into a
larger network. Our premise, in terms of channel structure,
was to allow our customers to have an Alpha level desk,
but with a similar channel count at 96kHz. The routing
isn’t dependent on the DSP structure, and you could
have, for example, a situation where you are connecting
more than one console together, and because you have
one of these router cards in each console, you have eight
thousand squared routes in each desk.”
Custom Decisions
Like other manufacturers, Calrec understands the
advantages of utilising off the shelf DSP technology
rather than developing propriety devices themselves,
as Goodman explains; “What’s clever about it is the way
we use them!” he says. “One of the things we learned
long ago was to avoid using custom chips – most of our
customers would get very nervous if we started talking
about and developing something that they could only
buy from Calrec. There are some people using FGPAs for
DSP processing, but we are the only broadcast company
using the newer chips, and no one else is approaching
us in this sector with respect to channel counts.”
While the DSP and Hydra2 system are improved versions
of technology already used in earlier Calrec consoles, the
control surface itself is something special – according to
Goodman. “This is the part of the desk which is completely
AUDIO MEDIA MAY 2009
new and uses technology we have never used before.”
The console uses OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode)
displays alongside touch screens for setting up routings
and displaying EQ curves and so on, which makes use of
touch membranes overlaid on the OLEDs. “The Apollo’s
channels are managed over 12 dual layers and on up to
320 physical faders, and assigned panels can be used
to control various parameters,” says Goodman.
“Because we use this OLED technology, the controls are
not dedicated – they are ‘soft’. So what we can do is to
use these to map a set of controls to individual panels.
You use the desk in an ‘assigned’ way of operating – which
is like a facsimile of the ‘traditional’ Calrec centre section
– or you can run the desk very much like a traditional
analogue configuration. The eight ‘wild’ controls above
each fader can have pretty much any function, such as EQ
controls or auxilaries for example, and you can map these
to create an analogue-like channel strip.” This can be done
CALREC APOLLO
Broadcast Console
per channel, per panel (eight faders wide), or over the
whole desk. “One of the challenges of designing digital
desks is providing feedback to the operator – especially
on one which operates on multiple layers,” says Goodman.
“The Apollo gives the operator a lot of visual feedback
very quickly. Being able to swap between these two
ways of operating can allow the user to easily change
between the more detailed mode of operation when
setting up, then switching to the ‘wild’ mode to run the
actual show.”
Under Pressure
In the heat of a broadcast, reliability is ultra-important,
and Calrec has tackled this area with multiple redundancy
systems, so you don’t miss a second of the broadcast.
“Not only is the system very compact, but we have
redundancy on the DSP cards, the power supplies, the
router, and the processing systems for communication
to the desk,” says Goodman. “Broadcast applications are
effectively live recordings, and our customers would be
asking some serious questions if we didn’t build in this
level of redundancy.” �
� GB£POA
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INFORMATION
� Calrec, Nutclough Mill, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire,
HX7 8EZ, UK
� +44 (0) 1422 842159
� +44 (0) 1422 845244
� www.calrec.com
� enquiries@calrec.com