LONDON: NEP Visions has selected the Pam2 3G16 Audio Monitoring unit from TSL Professional Products as its standard solution for audio confidence monitoring across its fleet of 10 advanced OB trucks. It chose the Pam2 platform to check Dolby, AES and analog audio streams instantly and to make sure its audio is in compliance with new loudness standards.
With a production slate that has included everything from the Royal Wedding in 2011 to the broadcast of the summer games in London, audio confidence monitoring was essential to NEP Visions. What’s more, it needed a system that its engineers could operate easily on the go.
The Pam2 units offer user-selectable scales, support for a range of standard input/output signals and the ability to dissect and monitor any multichannel audio signal structure from mixed mono, stereo and 5.1.
“The Pam2s are located in the audio racks and vision CAR, and are normally fed from a router destination within the trucks, so we use the units as check/go-to devices for AES and embedding monitoring, as well as for analogue inputs,” said Paul Fournier, head of sound at NEP Visions. “Another issue that the Pam2 helps us address is loudness measurement. The PamM2 tackles loudness regulation, both EBU and ATSC, with a set of tools that gives constant analysis and instant feedback. The new loudness functionality within the unit anticipates the recommendations and gives us the power to configure our own target and measurement parameters when we need them, all while providing reporting via the time-versus-level histogram and ‘over-target’ alarms.”
Over the last year, NEP Visions vehicles have been sending signals, including Dolby Digital, direct to cinemas providing, for example, live coverage of London’s National Theatre and the Opera from Glyndebourne, so that consumers can experience live events in HD and Dolby Surround. For the majority of the time, the signals don’t go through a traditional transmission stream anywhere. Instead, the signal literally uplinks directly to a multiplex theater.
“Pam2 is an easy-to-use package that gives NEP Visions the confidence that the audio streams from our OB vehicles will arrive at their destinations on the right channels, with the correct coding and the correct loudness,” Fournier said.
