HuskerVision, the media organisation serving University of Nebraska sports teams, has enhanced its audio production capabilities through a collaboration with Lawo, a specialist in live media production technology. HuskerVision installed Lawo’s solutions in August 2023.
HuskerVision, housed in the Michael Grace Production Studio, oversees all AV and broadcast production needs for University of Nebraska sports events, including live game entertainment, non-sport events, and television shows airing nationally on the Big Ten Network.
With a team of 30 to 50 university students, HuskerVision airs more than 100 fully produced television shows annually, providing national exposure to University of Nebraska athletes.
Garrett Hill, broadcast/systems engineer at HuskerVision, said: “After working with our Lawo installation for more than one year, we have been very happy with its performance and the quality of audio we’re getting out of it. Our environment includes a Home management platform for media infrastructures, two A__UHD Core audio engines configured as a primary backup pair, two Power Cores with one Dante card in each for integrating existing equipment, a handful of A__stage64 and A__digital stageboxes, and two mc²56 audio production consoles.”
Hill emphasised the significance of Lawo’s system architecture in managing IP audio streams between third-party equipment. “This was our first experience with IP-based audio that closely resembles environments based on ST 2110,” Hill said. “Our broadcast plant is still purely baseband for video, but now audio is an IP and baseband hybrid. With state-of-the-art equipment we’ve significantly elevated our audio quality and streamlined our workflow.”
“The A__stage and A__digital boxes’ ability to transmit out and subscribe to any AES67 streams directly, along with internal routing support, has simplified the management of audio signals in all venues,” Hill added. “Using Home, managing these device streams from Q-Sys and Dante equipment directly facilitates multiple simultaneous events and diverse audio routing needs.”
Lawo said that while the new installation improved HuskerVision’s operations, it required some fine-tuning of the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) mechanism to counter stability issues with the older network infrastructure. Lawo’s support team worked to ensure minimal disruption to operations.
