Soundcraft Broadcast Sales Buoyant Despite Market Conditions

Soundcraft Studer reports that sales of its analog Broadcast mixing consoles remain particularly strong, despite the economic conditions and even the transition to digital.

Sales of the long-established RM100, RM105, Series 10, Series 15 on-air desks and the production-orientated B400, B800 and BB100 desks are as strong as ever, proving that the market puts a lot of faith in choosing the right, reliable and proven products for use in its facilities.

Recent sales in the Broadcast sector have been made to City College Coventry, where 5 of the Series 10 desks have been installed in the technology suites for Media courses, and to Satellite Information Services Live who purchased 3 of the BB100 production mixers, with other analogue consoles sales to RAI and Radio Italia in Italy, TRT in Turkey and ERT in Egypt.
The company has also recently announced that many models will now be readily available from stock in standard configurations, which helps reduce delivery times for time-critical installations.

“We found that people are less willing to wait for custom-configured desks nowadays, (which we still do to order) but that most configurations used pretty-well identical modules. So we chose to stock what we consider to be the most popular configurations so that delivery times are minimized,” reports VP of Sales, Adrian Curtis.
The standard configurations typically include a mix of Mono, Stereo and Telco input modules, master module, VU meters and a timer.

“We had expected that digital consoles would make more of an impact in the simpler on-air end, but there is definitely still a very active analog sector, particularly in some OB applications where budgets and space are often tight” says Curtis. “Being able to offer fast deliveries on these consoles has definitely been well received by our customers.”

“Having said that, the Soundcraft® Vi Series of digital consoles, particularly the compact Soundcraft Vi4, has found favor in studios and the larger OB trucks recently, notable installations include Denmark’s TV2 OB truck, RAI in Italy, SWR in Germany, VRT in Belgium, TVE in Spain, and Russia’s RUR TV and RTR. The 72-input capacity of the Vi4, coupled with the broadcast-friendly remote stagebox and Vistonics II user interface, offers a great package for many applications requiring digital solutions. In these low-light environments, having the illuminated Soundcraft FaderGlow™ and Vistonics screens are a major advantage for operators.”

The Vi Series also has optional interface cards which make it particularly useful in HD trucks, such as an SDI de-embedder/embedder card, and a Dolby D/E decoder card, which help to save cost, space and weight. Other broadcast-specific functions include a high bus count for cleanfeed outputs, and configurable GPIO connections for fader starts, signalling etc.
Full details at www.soundcraft.com