As a follow up to our other story on Macquarie Southern Cross Media’s Southern Hub refit, radioinfo asked Group Engineering Manager for Radio Jim Vasey for detailed comments on how and why he chose the Lawo system for the Albury premises, and for first impressions on how it is going now that it has been working for a few weeks.

Here’s what he told us:

“Macquarie Radioworks planned to retire the central EpiCentre Router at the Albury Network Centre in the 08-09 financial year. This was brought forward when Epicentre suffered a series of disruptive crashes in June 2007.

We considered the systems being marketed in Australia and also looked overseas for the impression those products had made, particularly in the European market, where Lawo has a very large footprint in both Television and Radio, designing surfaces that can co-exist.

Lawo’s networking ability is one of its strongest points, with the ability to point to point, or point to multi-point distribute or contribute audio which the Albury Engineer Adam Barnes advocated as a major factor in years to come.

The configurability of Lawo was also a large factor, it’s completely driven from a GUI, with simple programming flow, and powerful state and event capturing, meaning you can pretty much design the console to do whatever you want for any situation you can think of.

R & D and software support were a very important part of the decision as well. After meeting the programmers from Lawo, they seemed very keen to know what we do differently here, and how their software and hardware can help us achieve it. The software and firmware upgrades are free for the life of the product, and they have a strong belief that R & D is necessary for a product to survive, something we learned the hard way with EpiCentre.

For these reasons, we chose the Lawo solution, with Zircon, Z2 and Nova router components.

The installation was set for early November, with Adam Barnes assuming the role of Project Manager. Planning was critical, as the Albury Hub is a source of national network programming and production, with EpiCentre being integral to nearly every operational function.

Tragically, a week before we were due to start, as you know, Adam was killed in a car accident. The network was badly shaken by his loss, and the installation was in serious jeopardy of indefinite delay. I called together an on-site crisis meeting of a team of MSCM engineering staff to consider the matter. Based on the preparation work already done by Adam and the support of Tony Fitzsimmons of Lawo Australia, the decision was taken to proceed with the change-out. Teams of engineers from Victoria, NSW and Townsville, led by Kevin Stephens and Andrew Meachen, were assigned on a rotating basis to achieve a modified timeline to completion.

I cannot speak highly enough of the dedication and work standard of the technical crews; they worked tirelessly to have the Central Technical Area, two broadcast studios and half a dozen news and production suites cut across by Christmas. The last facilities were commissioned in early January. Support from Tony Fitzsimmons and Lawo Germany was crucial in the successful commissioning of the system – Tony put in very long hours for configuration, testing and training, and did the product proud as an agent.

I’m happy to report that, so far, the decision to choose Lawo for our Southern network centre has been a very good one.”

Click below to view a more detailed story about the equipment used.