Building SENZ’s Auckland Studios From Scratch

Overview

SENZ launched in April 2021 as New Zealand’s 24/7 sports talk radio network, the local arm of Australia’s Sports Entertainment Network (SEN). It first went to air from the Stanley Street studios formerly used by the New Zealand Racing Board’s Trackside Radio, which Southern Broadcast had originally built.

With that tenancy coming to an end, SENZ needed its own purpose-built home. It chose a space in the historic Saatchi & Saatchi Building in Parnell, and SEN’s Director of IT and Engineering, Josh Pearson, asked Southern Broadcast to help design and build it.

The challenge

Sports radio asks more of a studio than music radio. There are more feeds in and out, more remote contributors, and bigger console channel counts. On top of that, the project faced:

• An extremely tight deadline. SENZ got the keys at the start of December 2021, and the switchover from Stanley Street had to happen by mid-January 2022.
• A bare heritage building. There were no walls and no studio spaces to start with. To soundproof the studios, they had to be built up off the building’s 100-year-old hardwood floors.
• COVID-19 lockdown. New Zealand went into a Level 4 lockdown as the build approached, bringing the project almost to a stop while the lease deadline stayed fixed.
• Closed borders. Josh and the SEN engineering team were stuck in Australia, so the New Zealand team had to handle installation and the transition on site.

Our solution

As Wheatstone’s New Zealand partner and systems integrator, Southern Broadcast worked with SEN’s engineers in Australia and New Zealand to design and specify the complete studio complex. SEN already ran Wheatstone across its network, so a new Wheatstone build, with SENZ’s existing equipment integrated, was the natural choice.

Southern Broadcast supplied the console surfaces, talent stations, WheatNet-IP I/O Blades, software and AoIP infrastructure. Everything was on hand ready for the start of the build. Working alongside our friends at systems integrator Integra Broadcast and the SENZ team, the studios were built out and networked in Auckland, with Josh and his team in Australia contributing remotely.

Built for fast-paced live sport. The studios use a combination of physical and virtual mixing:

• A Wheatstone LXE and an LX-24 in the main studios
• An L-8 console surface in one of two production studios
• A Remote LXE touchscreen mixer in the talk studio, with shared control and fader tracking to the main LXE, so on-air teams can work together and control phone lines, remote feeds and mics from either position
• Custom touchscreen panels designed by Integra Broadcast using Wheatstone’s ScreenBuilder, giving quick access to custom mixes, Tieline codecs and other shared resources

Scripted workflows. WheatNet-IP scripting was used to make the system work the way SENZ does. For example, buttons on the SS-8 OLED control panels map mics to incoming remote feeds, automatically assigning the correct mix-minus whether the voice is a commentator in the field or a presenter in the studio next door.

Simple and adaptable. The design kept things simple to operate, with fewer points of failure. Live sport comes in over established feeds rather than cables laid at every venue, and Tieline codecs are used wherever SENZ has its own commentators on site.

The result

Despite the lockdown, closed borders and a building that fought back at every step, SENZ switched over to its new Parnell studios on time on 15 January 2022.

Key facts

• Complete sports radio studio complex, designed and built from an empty heritage space
• Wheatstone WheatNet-IP AoIP throughout: LXE, LX-24 and L-8 surfaces, plus a Remote LXE touchscreen
• Existing SENZ equipment integrated into the new facility
• Around six weeks from getting the keys to going on air
• Delivered with Integra Broadcast, and with SEN’s Australian engineering team contributing remotely across closed borders

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Southern Broadcast Ltd is Wheatstone’s New Zealand partner and a broadcast engineering company providing studio, RF and transmission design, installation and support to broadcasters across New Zealand and the Pacific.

Planning a studio build or AoIP upgrade? Talk to Southern Broadcast about design, supply, integration and commissioning.