Fans listening closely to The Golf Channel will soon hear the results of the first Grass Valley Apex audio routing switcher and a Trinix digital video router from Thomson, part of a facility rebuild for the 24-hour golf network.
“Quite often we have two or three tournaments going on simultaneously and several digital and analog feeds coming in and out of our facility,” said Erv Vanags, director of engineering and operations for The Golf Channel. “The Apex and Trinix routers will give us the capacity to handle these signals with the reliability and precision we demand.”
The Golf Channel, the first broadcaster to order the new Apex routing switcher, is stocking its newly upgraded Orlando, Fla., facility with a 512 x 512 Apex and a Trinix digital routing matrix, initially populated at 256 x 256. The new Apex and Trinix systems will join an existing Venus 256 x 256 router for handling digital and analog video and analog audio, giving the company 512 x 512 I/O capacity to distribute multiple SDI, AES, and analog audio signals. The complete central core routing matrix, including several channels of Saturn Master Control, are managed via the Grass Valley Jupiter control system.
The network will use the Trinix system to route a variety of video signals, including analog and digital feeds, from national and international sources. Looking ahead, Vanags said all video files coming into the facility will be converted to SDI and then routed throughout the building as necessary. Audio will be handled by the Apex router in a similar fashion, with analog files being converted to AES digital audio.
The new Grass Valley routers will also enable The Golf Channel to pass through high-definition signals using the same frames. The Trinix digital video routing switcher family can handle SD and HD signals from 3 Mbps to 1.5 Gbps in the same frame and is available in three dense, fixed-frame sizes.
The Golf Channel reaches approximately 60 million cable, satellite, and wireless television viewers in North America and Asia.
