BskyB's audio post department has purchased seven Fairlight Satellite workstations; the sale, systems integration and support were supplied by Fairlight's UK business partner, Tekcare Limited. BSkyB's head of sound operations, Vaughan Rogers, said, “We set up a stringent set of evaluation criteria and the Satellite met or exceeded all of them and proved to be the quickest editing platform for our style of operation. Our crew has noticed a distinct improvement in sonic clarity, probably due to the Fairlight QDC engine.”

With Dolby technical facilities manager Tom Bruchs' and Dolby senior VP Ioan Allen's help, Dolby Laboratories' screening room received an audio upgrade via 11 QSC DCA amps providing system power, RAVE (Routing Audio Via Ethernet) signal transport and a half-dozen BASIS 922az for network monitoring and control — with system flexibility a key factor. “I never know what will be coming up the stairs, so I have to be ready for anything,” Bruchs noted. “One day, an engineer from within our laboratories may approach me with a test or experiment that needs to be done; the next, I could be working with a standards group from within the motion picture industry. In a place where anything can happen and probably will, I have to react quickly and know that the technology supporting my efforts will keep pace with whatever may transpire.”

The Jimmy Kimmel Live show, broadcast from El Capitan Entertainment Center in Hollywood, has gone native with a new PC running two Steinberg Nuendo 96/52DSP PCi interface cards and six Nuendo DD8 format converters that interface with three Yamaha 02R96 mixers via AES/EBU and are driven by Nuendo and Wavelab software. The system records 48 simultaneous channels of 24-bit, 48kHz multichannel audio from several performance locations, including three stages on the set.

According to Bart Chiate (pictured), the show's music mixer, “I can record 48 tracks wide at 24/48 on the 7,200 rpm IDE boot drive of my little 2.6-gig PC with only 1 gig of RAM and the system is rock-solid. Not even a hiccup. You have to move fast and be ready for anything. I can archive a show for a tenth of the cost of our tape-based system — the bean counters love that!”