MILAN, ITALY— Italian state broadcaster RAI, has taken delivery of its first four Studer Vista 9 digital mixing consoles from Italian distributor Leading Technologies, including a production console for the control room at the famous La Scala Theatre in Milan (Teatro alla Scala).
The new console has been installed in the RAI control room at the theatre, replacing the Vista 8, and will be used for live broadcasting for radio and TV, as well as recording of operas and classical concerts. This will upgrade the facilities within the Vista architecture, with the emphasis on 5.1 production.
According to LT’s Studer product manager Mauro Bucchia, the RAI sound engineers wanted to stick with the Vistonics interface. “The TFT based metering in the Vista 9 has provided additional facilities but a further advantage for them was the SCore Live engine, which doubles the DSP capacity, and which the existing Vista 8 doesn’t have,” he said.
The desk is configured with 64 mic inputs from the stage plus Line and AES I/O for local effects and machines and two MADI interfaces for multitrack recorders.
LT have provided Studer solutions for all four RAI production centers in Milan, Rome, Turin and Naples.
Another Vista 9 has been installed in the RAI auditorium in Turin, supplied with a Vista Compact Remote Bay. Replacing the previous digital console, this will be used for live broadcasting or the recording of classical music, since Turin is the base of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra.
The other stand-out features which defined this decision were the TFT metering and the Hisory mode, which records events such as overloads in the audio path of each channel, and highlights them in red on the channel waveform.
The Vista 9 is configured with 88 mic inputs plus Line and AES I/O for local effects and machines and two MADI interface for multitrack recorders.
At their Rome broadcast facilities, RAI has similarly upgraded its former digital desk to a Vista 9 in the radio production center of a general purpose studio. The History mode and TFT metering features will future proof the studio’s needs.
Another studio in Rome, identical to the first, will be upgraded with the second Vista 9. Both consoles have the same configuration, with 48 Mic inputs plus Line and AES I/O for local effects and MADI link to the studio’s monitor mixer.
