The clean sound of Dancing On Ice

Award-winning British TV show Dancing on Ice presents several acoustic and noise suppression challenges in getting a great sound for the viewer at home. Needing a large space to house the main ice rink, a training rink, the audience and the rest of the set, the show is shot in a vast hanger of a building on the disused airfield at RAF Bovington. There is minimal acoustic control on the walls, and the ice and video wall (which makes up the whole of the back of the set) present hard surfaces for any sound in the space to bounce off. Sound Supervisor Richard Sillitto of RS Sound told us how he coped with this to create the pristine sound that you hear on TV.

He said, “Fortunately, we have a very controlled PA and foldback system run by the careful hands of Josh Miles of Plus 4, so we can achieve good levels in the room both for the audience and as foldback for the performers on the ice.

“But despite this, there’s still a fair amount of coloration on the personal mics of the presenters, judges and dancers, and this is combined with background noise from the many fans in the lights and video wall cells around the studio.”

“With all of this unwanted noise there are two tools that are essential to allow us to get clean and tight audio to the viewer at home.

“We employ two CEDAR DNS 8 Lives to give us 16 mono channels of noise reduction, and these also serve to tame the coloration of the PA on the microphones.

“Deploying multiple channels of DNS enables us to reduce the noise at source before the channels are combined with other elements, and this gives the most effective results.”

We asked him how he used the noise suppressors in such an environment, and he continued, “I tend to learn the noise floor and then turn the active learning algorithm off so that I’m dealing with a known quantity.

“This probably doesn’t give the ‘best’ noise reduction in all circumstances, but it keeps the effects of the noise reduction predictable so that I can EQ for what I hear consistently.”

He concluded, “All of this has to happen in real-time without any loss of lip-sync, and in this environment we couldn’t obtain the same quality of results without CEDAR.”

The CEDAR DNS 8D CEDAR’s Dialogue Noise Suppression technology is the standard for removing background noise from dialogue in studios. With near-zero latency, high-resolution processing, and a fast, intuitive user interface, it eliminates traffic noise, air conditioning, wind, rain, babble and general background noise from audio signals.

It will also help to compensate for unfavourable acoustic conditions and poor microphone placement, and will even suppress excessive reverberation.

The CEDAR DNS 8D has been designed specifically for broadcast and live sound. With eight channels of noise suppression, it hosts a new algorithm that marries the best of the machine learning and signal processing on which the DNS 8 Live and the DNS 2 dialogue noise suppressors are based.

With its slick user-interface that includes standard and detailed modes of operation it offers better control than any previous dialogue noise suppressor, both from the front panel and from almost any web browser that can access its internal remote control software.

With its near-zero latency and standard 4-pin 12VDC input in addition to universal mains power, it’s suitable for use in all live situations – not just broadcasting, but also live sound in venues such as theatres, concert halls, conferences venues, and places of worship.

Dante is the de-facto standard for media networking, distributing uncompressed, multi-channel digital audio via standard Ethernet networks with near-zero latency and perfect synchronisation. The DNS 8D is the first DNS with a Dante interface in addition to its AES3 audio connections (DB25 using the AES59 pin-out).

With fail-safe AES3 audio bypass implemented in the form of hardware relays that immediately connect the inputs to the outputs in the event of a power failure or other significant disruption plus support for Dante’s redundant mode of operation which helps to protect against network failure, it can be installed with confidence in critical paths anywhere within the audio chain.

For more information, contact CDA Pro AV
+61 (0)2 9330 1750
sales@cda-proaudio.com
www.cda-proav.com

CX Magazine – June 2020   

LIGHTING  |  AUDIO  |  VIDEO  |  STAGING  |  INTEGRATION

Entertainment technology news and issues for Australia and New Zealand
– in print and free online www.cxnetwork.com.au

© VCS Creative Publishing