Panasonic AW-HN40H TV Technology: Guide to Sports Production - Page 13

D.C. United The stadium during construction MLS. The latter is a 16mm board, per the league requirement. He sees the improvements in the big boards reaching the MLS as part of the technology's evolution. "When the NFL's Baltimore Ravens updated to the team's 200-foot by 36-foot end zone boards two years ago to 10mm (which was also Olinger's project), I think the D.C. United's people went to a game and saw it. So, when the team built Audi Field, it wanted that image quality. Ten millimeter is a true HD 1080 image, and going that route also enabled United to incorporate a scorer's bug, so the ingame producers can add advertisements, scores, stats, etc.," to its presentation. Elsewhere around Audi Field, United went with about 250 Samsung commercial displays, ranging from 49 to 98 inches, at the suites, concession stands and other areas. 34 MILES OF CABLE Representatives of D.C. United declined to be interviewed about the broadcast setup, the location of the camera bays and the installation of certain equipment at Audi Field, saying those decisions were still to be made at press time. Instead, a team official referred TV Technology to Samsung and to Washington Professional Systems (WPS), which also contracted on the project. John Fish, senior project engineer with Wheaton, Md.based WPS, reeled off several stats about Audi Field. For instance, it houses 34 miles of broadcast cable; and the bowl's sound system features 80,000W of speaker load, powered by 130,000W of amplifier power, and houses four independent amplifier rack rooms. In addition, the ancillary speaker systems total 16,700W from the console to the speakers, and analog paths run par- allel, with primary and secondary digital paths for redundancy. WPS installed the audio system, bowl sound system with Community Professional Loudspeakers that include a QSZ headend distributed system, according to Fish, who added that WPS also provided and installed SMPTE fiber, the NewTek TriCaster in the head end and the Exterity IPTV system. "This is an excellent setup for an MLS franchise and I think the fans will be excited." -Chris Olinger, Prismview Electronics Fish noted the requirement that the bowl sound system recover and pass audio within 15 seconds when being switched to generator power was a particular challenge. "To accomplish this, we went 'old school' and avoided amplifiers with built-in networking, which take in excess of 60 seconds to boot back up and pass signal," he said. "All networked digital signal processing [DSP] components, which are fully supported by battery backup, feed analog audio to the amplifiers, which are on generator power." The ancillary speaker systems, which are muted for emergency announcements, all use networked amplifiers due to the convenience, he said. Continued on page 16 ❱ [13] TV TECHNOLOGY