Radio World Buyer’s Guide articles are intended to help readers understand why their colleagues chose particular products to solve various technical situations. This month’s articles focus on products for sports and remote broadcasts.
In the nearly 21 years he has been with Audacy, Ryan Sczomak has seen a variety of technology.
“Working with all six of our Audacy Detroit stations, Tieline is instrumental for us,” the engineer said.
“We use Tieline as the backbone of the Detroit Lions Radio Network on ‘97.1 The Ticket’ WXYT-FM, helping us ensure Detroit Lions listeners all over the state of Michigan can hear the Lions go all the way — hopefully to winning a Super Bowl.”
His championship aspiration now will have to wait at least ’til next season. But in its game day Tieline roster, Audacy uses a Gateway 16 at Ford Field to broadcast all home games.
“We do this by using several stereo streams including main program audio, a producer communication channel, a feed to the stadium that is distributed to the concourse, and a feed to the Audacy suite,” Sczomak said.
“The Gateway at the studio has a fifth stream that sends to our uplink provider. Having the functionality of multiple stereo channels on a single codec is extremely helpful, as the NFL is the most complicated to run of the four major sports. We utilize the ViA codec for our pregame remotes on 97.1 The Ticket, the Lions radio flagship; and on the road we travel with a ViA for play-by-play coverage.”
Though they rely on a LAN connection in stadiums, having the LTE as a backup is a welcome feature.
“The dual internal LTE cards in the ViA make it an invaluable piece of equipment for us. We use SmartStream Plus redundant streaming for the stadium link to the studio and Fuse-IP data bonding from the studio to our uplink provider.”
A Mackie VLZ mixer feeds the Gateway at Ford Field, while on the road the ViA is fed from several types of mixers. They utilize the Gateway on the studio side with Livewire, and the Lions network studio has an Axia Quasar board.
“For a typical Lions play-by-play broadcast, we encode using MusicPlus at 128 kbps. On the return path, we use a mono mix-minus feed and producer communication on the second channel. This allows us to integrate programs, mix minus and communications with a single codec.”
They use the Cloud Codec Controller for every Lions road game. This allows Sczomak to remote in to configure the codec if the engineer is having any issues, something that happens as some road engineers are less familiar with the ViA.
“This gives both of us peace of mind knowing that I am able to check on the codec before the game to ensure that the send and receive numbers are appropriate and that both sides of the SmartStream Plus redundant streaming are connected.”
He said ViA’s audio quality is top-notch and has very low latency.
“Having shows that are very heavily caller-based makes low latency a must. Our market’s other two engineers have found the systems simple to configure, and the news and music personalities have made easy work of them, too. When I do have a question, Jacob Daniluck and the tech support staff at Tieline are always quick to help get us pointed in the right direction.”
