Called to Order

Like everywhere else in the world, Frankston City Council is adapting its operations to suit the COVID environment. From the start of 2020, they were shut to public access, while council business continued apace. Personal distancing requirements were a new factor in these processes and required moving council meetings from their usual chambers to the now empty 800-seat auditorium at the related Frankston Arts Centre. Spreading everyone out was great for physical separation but less so for speech enhancement and recording.

Arts Centre techs did what AV techs do, cobbling together a system with gear at hand to get things going. A bunch of SM58s, cables everywhere into drop boxes, feeding an SD11, in turn going back out to up to 14 monitors. According to venue tech, Jeremy O’Rourke, “We used everything we had. It was quite a big production.” It also took a lot of time and labour – “our setup and packup time was ridiculous. Two guys for 4-5 hours for each session.”  

New Team Leader of Technical Operations, Damian Clarkson expands: “It was bit of nightmare, like mixing a musical without a script. We didn’t know who was talking, and we have a lot of people without great mic technique,” making recording and playback difficult.

When council meetings later moved to the function centre, the technician time and labour demands were still onerous. The room needed resetting after every session and not just AV equipment, “it’s the furniture, drapes, power and everything. It was just insane.” 

BRING IN THE NEW

The AV team compiled a submission to council and their managers to investigate a new mic system. They did their research and some shopping around but, for Damian, the Shure MCXW system “was the one that stood out. It was the only one that really suited what we needed.” 

Working with Glenn at Jands and Tobias at ENGIE AV, they purchased 18 x MXCW640 Wireless Conference Units paired with MXC Dualflex Gooseneck Microphones. A SB930 Rechargeable Battery was added for each unit and the package included 2 x MXCWNCS Networked Charging Stations.

The MCXW system works well enough independently but also outputs into a Biamp TesiraFORTÉ DAN CI for further processing and routing to archives and live playback. According to Damian, “the output goes to the video guy who takes the stream. We do that twice, so I’ve got a standalone recorder that gets an output from the Tesira for our dedicated audio archive, but we also send that through to the video operator who embeds that with their video archive.”

Jeremy goes further on the setup’s capabilities: “We have two Blackmagic web presenters that we use to integrate zoom and similar things. It’s video broadcast but we also get the audio feed from that into the Tesira.” Most of the mic processing is done by the MXCW unit itself. Damian: “I think it’s brilliant. It works very well. The AGC works great, and the sound of the mics has been excellent – really clear and intelligible.”