US Open Reflections: Game, set and match to Lawo consoles and routing

For the 2015 US Open, host broadcaster ESPN enlisted the services of Gearhouse Broadcast, whose experience in establishing technical infrastructures for major international tennis tournaments requires no introduction. New for 2015 was the integrated audio set-up with a centralised infrastructure capable of fast and efficient resource-sharing

Gearhouse’s solution made substantial use of Lawo equipment. Providing a pivot for the set-up, Gearhouse tied together two Nova73 Audio Routers for collecting all the signals from the DALLIS Stageboxes out on the courts and the commentators in the stands. The distribution to the transmission gear was handled with the Nova73 Routers using AES and MADI.

Surround audio mixing in the seven control rooms was undertaken on Lawo mc²56 consoles connected to the central audio router. Each Lawo console had access to the signals from every court, and every control surface could be deployed to handle audio from all of the courts.

All international courts were equipped with 32-fader desks, while the domestic control room hosted a 64-fader console. For the domestic mix, the integrated AutoMix features of the Lawo desks proved to be invaluable.

Besides the audio equipment Gearhouse also used video equipment from Lawo, with 16 V__pro8 video processors providing all standard video glue functionalities such as FrameSync and De-/Embedding.

The US Open also saw Lawo supporting ESPN and Gearhouse with on-site technical support for entirety of the tournament. In addition, a training programme for the operators was put in place to guarantee a smooth start from the very first serve.