MTV Canada, a subsidiary of CTV, recently rebuilt its Audio Control Room 1 (ACR1), the larger of the two control rooms in its Masonic Temple location in Toronto. Among the many issues at hand was the selection of a mixing console that met the network’s current and future broadcast production conditions. After an extensive series of evaluations, the network chose a Lawo mc²56 digital console, equipped with 64 faders, 144 DSP channels, a remote microphone stage box and a DALLIS frame for local I/O and roughly 72 channels of analog I/O capacity. It was installed in early April 2009.
The challenges of upgrading ACR1 with a new mixing desk were multifold, as Kent Ford, MTV Canada’s audio supervisor, who is responsible for all audio elements pertaining to MTV’s shows, explained. “ACR1 handles a broad range of production tasks,” Ford said. “In the process of evaluating mixing systems, we looked very closely at how the console handled stereo — our current production format — and surround-sound mixing, which is where we’re headed in the very near future. The mc²56’s modular design enables the console to be very flexible, making it fast and easy to reconfigure the board for different types of production.”
Shawn Hughes, production engineering manager for the network, supervises an engineering team in support of MTV Canada and other CTV clients. He also serves as the building’s technical producer. “We’re one of only two production-based facilities for CTV,” he said. “We handle a wide range of projects and, as a result, we required a console that could readily adapt from broadcast production to music mixing to live programming. The mc²56 can easily be reconfigured and we already have a good number of snapshots that enable us to recall settings for a variety of production tasks. Equally important, the console can readily adapt to evolving production standards without extensive engineering efforts, and it met our technical requirements in terms of integration with the overall facility.”
