Press Release: IOC's Olympic Broadcast Standardizes on Ensemble Reference Generators

Grass Valley, California – 16 April 2007

The Olympic Broadcast Systems has standardized on Ensemble Designs’ Avenue™ signal integration system for providing sync and reference. The Avenue system provided reference and test signals at the Salt Lake and Torino Olympic games and will be used for upcoming games as well. For the Beijing, Vancouver and London games, all system design, build up and staging will happen at the Olympic Broadcast Systems offices in Madrid. The equipment will then be packaged and shipped to the venue country.

The Avenue 5400 module has been used since the Salt Lake City games to provide basic timing and reference generation. The 5400 module, which provides analog and SD SDI test signals and black along with analog and AES audio outputs, was also used to test the line up of circuits.

The Avenue 7405 HD test signal generators were used beginning with the Olympic Games in Athens. In Torino there was an even larger HD presence, as every venue had an HD feed to enable HD testing from all locations.

In Beijing there will be 40 venues and all will have Ensemble Avenue 5400 and 7405 modules to provide basic sync and reference for the video and audio paths. In China, all productions will be in HD. In order to make the system simpler to organize and maintain, trucks will all originate in HD and other signals will be distributed as needed. There will also be a multilateral path that is for “rights only” broadcasters. This will consist of a redundant path with two fibers running in two different directions. The Avenue 5400 will be used to feed pathological and colour bars to the path. The Ensemble equipment will then be used to perform critical measurements of the transport paths.

Ensemble Designs’ Avenue frame is 3RU and holds 10 modules. In addition to sync pulse generators and test signal generators, there are HD upconverters, audio embedders and several other modules useful for broadcast. The touch screen control panel and Avenue PC software offer control, monitoring and alarms with Ethernet and SNMP.