Danmon Sverige integrates Friends Arena media production centre
Lawo consoles form an integral part of the infrastructure at the media production centre located within the Friends Arena, situated near Lake Råstasjön to the north of Stockholm. Opened on 27 October 2012, the venue is home to Sweden’s national football team and Stockholm club AIK, and is able to accommodate 65,000 people for concerts, and 55,000 for sports events.
The acclaimed new facility includes a high spec media production centre operated by Onside TV Productions. Integrated by Danmon Sverige and intended primarily to serve Swedish football events, the centre will be used to handle tasks including web-based broadcast, DVD production and advertising management.
Able to handle up to 30 cameras, the Friends Arena comprises three fully-equipped production rooms and two sound suites, along with two edit suites, a voiceover studio, vision control and a graphics facility. The sound suites are both equipped with full 5.1 monitoring, with a 16+16-fader Lawo mc²56 MKII console installed in Audio Control 1 and two 8+8-fader Lawo sapphire consoles in Audio Control 2. The facility also has a studio overlooking the stadium that has one of four moveable Lawo DALLIS stageboxes as part of a Lawo network connecting all the consoles and stageboxes.
An overriding consideration – and one that played a significant part in the selection of the Lawo systems – was redundancy. The need to be able to provide 24/7 operation meant that both the control and DSP/routing systems had to be extremely reliable and offer failsafe facilities and power supplies. In addition, the whole facility has a huge UPS that is able to keep all systems operational in the event of a power failure.
The mc²56 MkII offers 888 audio channels and 144 summing busses, and uses 40-bit floating-point processing. It offers up to 760 inputs and up to 64 subgroups, with 32 aux sends, up to 96 track busses and up to 48 main summing busses. The sapphire, meanwhile, supports 96 mono DSP input channels with 128 DSP modules (96 on input channels, 32 on summing busses). The DALLIS I/O system can accommodate a wide range of plug-in cards via a central master card, which is available with RAVENNA or MADI interfaces.
The Onside TV production center also serves as an MCR for all of Sweden’s football matches, both for live broadcast and recording. Everything the centre handles is also recorded for possible editing for use in weekly highlight programmes and for archiving.