Videohouse Belgiumchooses ADAM SX Surround Setup for their Outside Broadcasting HD Trucks

JO FLETCHER-CROSS from Audio Media magazine visited Videohouse, Belgium

I’m stopped in my tracks by the trucks – they are quite simply enormous. HD02 is slightly smaller, the HD01 is something else altogether. It stands there gleaming like a monument to outside broadcasting.

We climb up the steel steps to the HD01, pausing in the snazzy entrance to examine the softly glowing lights in the floor before opening the glossy green door to reveal what must be the funkiest truck in Belgium. Before even looking at the equipment, I’m impressed by the mood lighting and the very cool strips of colour all over the ceiling – it looks a bit like a space ship fitted out by Habitat rather than the interior of a truck. It looks great, but it’s not just a pretty truck as Dany Meeuwissen from Internal Sales at Amptec, who is showing me round, is keen to stress. “It doesn’t just look good,” says Dany, as he ushers me into the heart of the van. “It sounds good too.”

With all this equipment, acoustic treatment is an important consideration, and Eddy Brants the designer of the new trucks, is a seasoned professional, having also designed the OB4, OB6, OB7, OB8, and OB10 units for Videohouse.

Brants feels he has got it under control. “VRT has chosen a good acoustical environment. I’m trying to isolate the noisy hardware and to absorb the maximum noise. The isolation is done with special 30dB multiplex, and the latest measurements are NR 25 in the audio control booth.”

Monitoring is almost completely provided by Adam, a natural choice for Brants who has installed Adam speakers into his previous truck designs for Videohouse and Cinevideo. The main monitoring is done with three Adam S3X-H, one SUB10, and two S1X (surrounds).

In the production area, there is a surround set from Adam with five S1X, with a SUB7, and in the secondary production area there is an S1X stereo pair for the Director. Some more are studded around the truck – including some cleverly integrated into the ceiling by way of a bit of ingeniuous sawing and adjusting.
Brants is just as pleased with the installation of the Adam monitoring in this truck as in his other designs. “They sound very natural and equal in the different zones of the OB truck,” he explained. There are a few non-Adam speakers in the truck.

I wonder about the additional challenges of surround monitoring into a truck. “For the sound area, it is not that difficult. You can put your speakers in a correct way so that the Sound Supervisor can sit in the sweet spot. In the production area, though, it will only be the Director who will sit in the sweet spot. The rest of the people in the production area will not be able to listen to good surround.” What about separation and coherence at the sub-mix positions?
We’ve chosen to keep this area separate from the rest of the second production area. It is not the ideal place to mix big surround projects, but for smaller programmes it will do.

On The Road

Fernand Holtof, the Technical director at VRT, explained how and why the equipment in the truck was chosen by the team at VRT. “The ADAM monitors were selected by an audio panel, with eight audio engineers, during an elaborate test with the most common professional speakers in all sorts of conditions with all sorts of music and speech. All our sound engineers are very pleased with them.

Our thanks go to Audio Media for letting us use this article.