The year saw studio standardization projects take off in a big way, many combining both glass surfaces for laptops and console surfaces for fixed studios shared across dozens of stations. Shown above, Bonneville San Francisco studios. Bonneville International owns 22 radio stations in Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, Sacramento, San Francisco and Salt Lake City, all standardized or in the process of being standardized on WheatNet-IP audio networked studios.

From left to right, Aaron Farnham, Regional Director of Engineering for Bonneville, and Robert Fields, CE for Bonneville Phoenix, during a recent visit to the Wheatstone factory where complete studio systems were manufactured, configured and staged before shipping to Bonneville sites. 

It took a lot of these components (above) and some circuit boards, precision machining, and so much more to come together in our New Bern factory to make studio magic happen once again in 2022. Wheatstone completed a record number of studio projects in 2022, including studio standardization projects for the top broadcast groups in the U.S. and around the globe. We start Wheatstone v.2023 with a new cloud-ready broadcast software suite, new additions to our R&D engineering team, the latest in manufacturing equipment, and double the component inventory the previous year.

This is what it's all about. Champagne FM's new studios in Reims, France.

In yet another example of Restless Studio Syndrome, this studio fits into two flight cases and is ready to go in 10 minutes. Included is a self-contained DMX 8 console, an Aura8-IP for mic processing, a Tieline Genie codec, a playout system (mAirList) and a SIP-IP phone (Studiophone by Micromedia), all connected via WheatNet-IP. The studio is rented out by all4radio.com when not in use by RTV, Austria, a WheatNet-IP shop.

The year 2022 saw broadcast engineers disappearing faster than redwood trees and giant pandas, leaving systems integrators and broadcast manufacturers such as Wheatstone to fill different roles at different times in the life of a facility. Wheatstone sales and systems engineers have been busier than ever creating new studio spaces for stations large and small, from initial planning and manufacturing to final commissioning and everything in between. (More on this subject at Broadcast Engineers Are Disappearing and Engineering Shortage Part II).

This little slice of silicon is the latest in FPGAs and is a good example of how supply chain issues continue to cast a long shadow across our industry. Spartan-7, shown here, became the go-to FPGA when the popular Spartan-6 neared end-of-life and became harder to get … which then led to impossible lead times on Spartan-7 FPGAs. We happened to have this one and several of its friends in inventory because our engineering and development team had updated from Spartan-6 to Spartan-7 FPGAs during the development of our new Blade 4—long before this recent supply chain interruption reared its ugly head. (Read The Latest Twist in the Supply Chain.)

It finally happened, after years of anticipation and speculation. The industry’s first all-software broadcast suite for streaming, mixing and FM/HD audio processing arrived in April. We call it Layers Software Suite, which runs on any server in your rack room or off-site at an AWS or other cloud extension of the WheatNet-IP audio network. Spin up or down mixing, FM/HD processing and streaming instances when needed, your server or Amazon’s servers. With Layers, broadcasters are now able to extend studio failover redundancy across multiple AWS or Google cloud data centers, centralize stream provisioning and processing, and replace racks of gear along with the associated engineering, maintenance, and real estate costs.

Virtualization officially touched the inner sanctum of broadcasting when VoxPro met VMWare as part of an experiment at K-LOVE and Air1 last year. In this Zoom interview, Principal Studio Engineer Bill Jackson discusses how he centralized VoxPro audio recording and editing functions across the network using VMWare and thin client. 

Highly compressed audio is so 1990s. These days, it’s linear audio all the way for broadcast groups like Crawford in Chicago, which extended its WheatNet-IP studio to its transmitter site in Lansing, Illinois, using a Cambium 18GHz link. 1Gbps Ethernet links such as this, as well as high-speed fiber, 5G and satellite services, are doing away with the highly compressed pipeline for transporting audio from point A to point B (for more information, click on Linear All the Way for Crawford Chicago). 

The great migration to cloud has begun in earnest, starting with on-premise “cloud” servers in the station rack room. Our Engineering Manager Dominic Giambo spoke at the April NAB Broadcast Engineering and Technology (BEIT) conference about on-premises servers and other practical migration paths (click on his article and video here: Servers as the Gateway to Cloud). One Dell or Hewlett Packard server can run multiple Layers mixing instances for several consoles located throughout the studio facility, plus serve Layers FM/HD audio processing with full MPX out to the transmitter as well as provisioning and metadata for multiple streams out to the CDN provider. 

ATSC 3.0 is still going strong at Capitol Broadcasting Company in Raleigh, N.C., a long-time Wheatstone AoIP shop that began running an ATSC 3.0 channel under experimental license a little over six years ago. (First U.S. Experimental ATSC 3.0 License, Six Years Later.) We start the New Year with at least 68 U.S. markets broadcasting with ATSC 3.0 and 70+ NextGen TV set models available.

We’re just beginning to realize the benefits of centralizing audio processing on-premise in a server or, in some cases, offsite at cloud data centers. One benefit of our new Layers FM/HD audio processor, according to our Jeff Keith (Audio Processing Weather Report: Partly Cloudy), is that processing as an instance on a server lets us apply competitive techniques that we might not have had the DSP cycles for in a hardware unit. 

If gamers can play video games through Amazon data centers without an Xbox unit and not experience noticeable delays − and we’re told they can − what does that mean for the rest of us? It could mean that live mixing in an Amazon data center near your studios is possible − and becoming more possible as AWS and other data centers continue to crop up in major metro areas. Add high-speed services like Starlink and 5G, and full 192 kHz MPX out to the transmitter becomes much more practical. There will always be tradeoffs with latency and buffering for packet loss, something we’re very familiar with as an AoIP manufacturer, but the next year could very well give us better tradeoff options and free up studio space, engineering, and workflows like we’ve never experienced before. Stay tuned.

Remote Solutions Video Demonstrations

Watch Jay Tyler's video series demonstrating the various solutions Wheatstone offers for remote broadcasting.