Crystal Vision in Big Doordarshan Order

Crystal Vision has sold 406 interface boards to India's Doordarshan Kendra, in what was not only the company's first ever sale to India's national broadcaster but also its largest order of 2007.

Doordarshan Kendra (DDK) is one of largest broadcasting organisations in the world with an extensive number of studios and transmitters. Focusing on the production of programmes covering entertainment and culture, news and current affairs and sports including regional–specific programmes in the relevant language, DDK transmits 46 channels terrestrially to more than 90 percent of the Indian population and also broadcasts an international channel via satellite to 146 countries across the world. As part of their ongoing upgrade to digital, Doordarshan Kendra needed a large number of conversion, distribution and embedding products for 22 of its studio complexes located throughout India, and chose Crystal Vision as its interface supplier for the first time.

Most of the boards purchased are being used to provide conversion between analogue and digital sources, and included 116 of the ADDEC-210 and ADDEC-310 analogue to digital converters and 118 of the ALLDAC and ENC116 digital to analogue encoders. The ADDEC-210, ADDEC-310 and ALLDAC are all boards which have been launched this year, and offer the highest quality 12 bit conversion. Distribution was the other main requirement, with 64 VDA110M distribution amplifiers to distribute analogue video and 78 DDA108 to distribute SDI sources. Doordarshan Kendra is increasingly using embedded audio in its studios, and the broadcaster therefore also purchased ten of the world's first dual embedder/de-embedder, TANDEM-110, for embedding and de-embedding analogue audio, as well as 20 of the multi-functional Demon 2 de-embedding monitor to both de-embed analogue audio and convert SDI to 12 bit broadcast quality PAL for transmission. The 406 boards are being housed in 62 of the Indigo 2 2U rack frames, with all the frames using the new PSU-160i power supply launched earlier this year which offers increased power at a lower cost.

The equipment is being supplied by the Crystal Vision distributor, AGIV (India) PVT Ltd., who has played an important part in building up the relationship between Doordarshan and Crystal Vision over a number of years.