Station to station
Published: ASIA
At the forefront of Thailand’s music and media activities, GMM Media recently refurbished its broadcast facility with a new technical system to meet present and future needs.
Having more than 25 years of consistent growth and development behind it, GMM Media Public Company Ltd is the leading company in the fields of music, TV and radio production, publishing, show production and promotion, artist management, on-line content distribution, retail and radio broadcasting in Thailand. A division of GMM Grammy Plc, GMM produces content for free-to-air TV, operates satellite, cable TV and radio channels and four FM stations in Bangkok. The stations – Green Wave 106.5; Hot 91.5 FM, Chill 89 FM and 94 EFM – are broadcast from studios on the 38th floor of the GMM Grammy Place Building in Bangkok. These studios have been fully refurbished in the past six months with new wall, floor, ceiling treatments, technical furniture and redesigned reception and public areas. The update has brought a fresh new look to the studios, which were built some nine years ago.
Telesto Broadcast Solutions has had a long relationship with GMM Media, beginning with the building of on-air and postproduction studios in 2004, and has provided assistance with regard to transmission issues and quality improvements since. It was identified some time ago that the original design of the facility was not very flexible and, although functional, was not able to meet the current and future demands of the station – especially as GMM Media moves forward to include new delivery platforms such as the internet and satellite channels (Green Channel). Having previously built new technical facilities for another major broadcaster in Thailand in 2006 using Klotz Digital DCII as the core of the system, and having detailed discussions with GMM Media on its requirements, it was natural that Telesto would recommend a similar solution with fully-assignable and customisable controls for GMM Media.
The Klotz DCII modular approach and the ability to customise the control surface with a choice of modules were important to GMM Media, as was the clean and simple presentation the system offers to its DJs. The GMM Media Klotz hardware comprises the latest version of the successful DCII range with upgraded modules and a revised console surface, which is believed to be the first in Asia. In addition, 16 fader split consoles have been supplied to complement the new studio design. ‘Telesto introduced me and my team to the Klotz DCII and Vadis Router system at Broadcast Asia 2008,’ recalls Apisit Andy Poonnaniti, assistant director for GMM Media IT and Radio Broadcasting Division. ‘I was immediately impressed with the ability to configure the system to meet our changing programming needs’.
The use of the Vadis fibre-optic audio network for the DC II control surface allows direct access to the router from any DCII console. Various audio input, output, network and interface cards have been inserted into the frames to provide DSP such as dynamics, EQ and the mixing of signals. The modular Vadis approach also enables individual frames to be connected together to create a fault tolerant router. The Ethernet-based control signals interconnect the consoles to each other in addition to the digital network, which means the control surfaces can be placed in the studios independent of the audio processing and routing backbone.
GMM’s broadcast facility comprises seven on-air studios, five production, three sound booths, a live studio, audience room, MCR and media production rooms for FM, internet and mobile streaming. A large part of the project’s requirement was to deliver a system that is fully upgradable in the future, is flexible and of the latest design – the plan was to upgrade five of the seven studios and later to add the remaining two, as well as possible off-site studios. Accordingly, the system has been designed with these eventualities in mind, and once GMM Media confirmed the requirement, the integration of the new studios could proceed with minimal disruption and reconfiguration to the existing system.
The renovations commenced in July 2009, undertaken for GMM Media by Group O with the technical installation by Telesto. Most of the work took place in the MCR (master control room), where existing studio equipment racks were stripped of the old system and new interface panels installed. Telesto used pre-assembled XLR termination panels throughout the project to simplify this aspect of the installation. The time saved on-site and the flexibility this gave allowed a fast studio turn-around – and the ability to bypass existing equipment quickly was proven to be well worth the effort. The greatest challenge was to ensure that the stations were kept on air during the refurbishment and rebuild process.
GMM Media engineers installed the new and relocated equipment under the guidance of Telesto project manager Bruce Sierak. Led by chief engineer, Chatchai Ruengsubanek, they managed the process of decommissioning and transfer of studios throughout the project, and great credit is due to them and the programme staff of GMM Media who were subject to a lot of disruption and inconvenience. Each channel was relocated to a spare studio and, in Phase 1, three of the seven studios were stripped of equipment and all existing cables identified. Group O built temporary isolation walls to contain noise and dust and the team was then able to proceed during evening and weekends to complete its work, which included new technical furniture. The MCR had been cleared of all unnecessary equipment and the racks for the first three studios prepared in readiness for the new equipment.
The modular Vadis V888 frames were located in the MCR as the previous hardware was terminated in dedicated racks for each studio, and running new cables to the existing studios was difficult due to access problems and constraints on time and disruption to the existing services. Fortunately the existing inter-area cables could be reused but, even so, fibre was used to interconnect the studio frames to the router frames within the MCR to accommodate the distribution of common sources and increase the functionality of the Vadis Router network to cater for disaster recovery and future expansion. Two router frames were used with the main transmission split across both frames; the back-up transmission paths are reversed. Shared resources were equally spread between each of the frames and both frames were tied together and work as a single router. There is built-in redundancy with automatic switching in the event of silence or a fault being detected by the Vadis software.
Talkback is incorporated into the router allowing the studios to talk to one another, MCR and production, and the studio can talk to the co-producer workstations located outside each studio.
Once the routers had been commissioned, the studios followed, and as each studio was completed and tested, GMM Media engineers relocated the operations staff back to the refurbished studio. Klotz engineering manager, Lee Chin Kah, worked with Telesto to finalise the console configurations – in particular the router configurations required several versions to accommodate the temporary routing of studios and MCR resources during the renovation period.
The GMM Media engineer staff, trained by Lee Chin Kah, then trained and assisted the programme staff. The switchover to the new studios was painless and as soon as the studio was on-air, work began on stripping out the vacated studios. ‘Despite the short-term changes required because of the phasing of the project, I found the commissioning very straight forward as Telesto is very familiar with the DC II system and GMM Media engineering staff were very quick to learn and realise the full potential of the Klotz system,’ Lee Chin Kah commented.
Phase 2, of course, required the renovation contractor to rebuild isolation walls, and Telesto was able to return in late October to complete the remaining two studios and finalise the reconfiguration of the routers. Currently all four FM stations are using the new Klotz DCII system with a fifth studio as an emergency/ backup.
‘The partnership between Klotz Digital and Telesto Broadcast Solutions gave me confidence that whatever obstacles and problems might arise with such a complicated refurbishment of our facility, they would be handled with professionalism and dedication,’ Apisit Poonnaniti summarises. ‘We now have a brand new facility that will allow GMM Media to grow to meet the changing face of media broadcasting in Thailand.’
‘The ability to monitor audio levels in studios and MCR, the monitoring of remote TX site audio and the ability to reassign studios for maintenance and disaster recovery is a major benefit to GMM Media,’ adds Telesto’s Bruce Sierak, on the advantages the new system brings to the station engineers. ‘This was not possible in the old system design, which did not use a central router. With the new system in place, all such monitoring as well as routing of signals can be easily done with the touch with a button and from the engineering office located two floors below the studios’
Claiming a 70 per cent share of the Thai entertainment industry, any project involving the GMM operation is certain to be of interest, both locally and further afield. All in all, the success of this particular project is down to the coordinated effort between suppliers, builders, client and systems integrator, in difficult on-going site conditions and in a live station environment.
Published in PAA March-April 2010