Orlando, FL—Firehouse Productions, the live sound provider ensconced inside the NBA Bubble at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL., has also been supporting broadcast and team communications throughout its time there, providing and maintaining a massive Riedel Bolero wireless and Artist digital matrix intercom solution for the duration of the season, ending this month.
The Riedel solution enables officials, coaches and production personnel to communicate safely during NBA games played in the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. The NBA Bubble is a strict isolation zone created to allow the 2019-2020 basketball season to continue while protecting NBA players from COVID-19.
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The on-site deployment consists of a dozen Riedel Artist intercom nodes, providing nearly 500 active communications ports to support 113 master panels; 57 Performer C3 intercom beltpacks; 116 Bolero wireless intercom beltpacks; and 186 analog 4-wire connections to six onsite OB trucks. Deployed in a fully redundant fiber ring configuration, the Artist nodes are able to support users communicating via Bolero beltpacks throughout the vast ESPN complex, including players, coaches, and officials in the green zone, where games are played on three venues, and the yellow zone, encompassing the technical and broadcast compound.
“This was a complex installation,” said Vinny Siniscal from Firehouse Productions. “Working with the Riedel team, we were able to design a truly elegant and integrated solution that enables crystal-clear communications while also ensuring that officials, coaches, and producers maintain safe distances from each other.”
Luis Espinal, intercom curator for the Firehouse team, built custom logic functions into the Artist nodes that allow specific mic feeds to be routed to specific broadcast trucks. The onsite Bolero universe, based on two fully redundant hub-and-spoke networks of Luminex switches, offers up to 128 multicast flows, giving the deployment room to grow as more beltpacks are needed.
“The ability to add custom logic to the Artist network was a huge plus because it allowed us to build in more redundancy and ensure effective monitoring for the entire intercom ecosystem,” said Siniscal.
Riedel • www.riedel.net
