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Audio Failure during CW NASCAR broadcast

D

Doctor_Technical

As I'm watching Xfinity practice and qualifying this morning, the booth audio has hard-failed failed several times. Interestingly, the in-car and track audio has stayed up, as has video. While the main audio was/is down, CW had a single announcer speaking through a bandwidth-limited audio channel. Comrex Opal codec? Old-school analog frequency-extender? One guy talking into a cellphone? Lord knows I've had to do the latter once or twice.
 
Comrex (either Opal or the FieldTap app) usually uses the Opus codec (7kHz bandwidth). Not horrible, certainly better than dead air.

I haven't worked in a big truck, so I don't know if a hot dial-up POTS (or cell) feed is established to the TOC anymore. Back in the day, falling back to a POTS audio feed happened enough that you knew that hot-standby option was available. I guess the last time I heard one on the air was the 1989 World Series, where ABC was on the phone feed for a few minutes until they could get the sat truck back on the bird after the earthquake knocked it off aim.

I've only had to use Plan B once (for radio), and it was paired with a Comrex codec, so the audio was comparable with the ISDN audio we would have used (the ISDN codec was damaged in shipping on the team bus).
 


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