Examples of team sports are basketball, baseball, football, hockey, and, for reasons that will make sense to anyone who has seen the back of a TOC rack, we’ll add studio projects. There is no finish line without a dash of luck, an occasional punt, and a whole lot of teamwork. That’s true for any studio project, and it was especially true for 98.5 The Sports Hub, Boston’s flagship station for football, hockey, basketball, and soccer that moved into a new studio space a while back, along with seven other Beasley stations ...

We’re rethinking how to build a radio station. It wasn’t too long ago that you needed a studio for every station and a fader for every source in that studio. Then along came AoIP, and with it, every source on every fader and the shrinking size and number of studios needed. Now, with automation systems like Zetta, WideOrbit, and ENCO tightly integrated into WheatNet IP, we can do even more with less. “The automation system is now essentially driving things so when I hit the button to put my live show on air, the automation comes in and lays out all the faders and away we go. That changes the way we think about building studios,” commented our Tech Support Engineer John Davis, who commissions dozens of WheatNet IP studios every year ...

Sometime in April the Internet crossed a major sound barrier. Researchers transferred 301 Tbps of data across a single standard optical fiber, the equivalent of transferring 1,800 4K movies over the internet in one second and 4.5 million times faster than the average home broadband speed today. And to think, we used to consider a gigabit-per-second fast! At the rate things are going, we will all be ziplining live media across distance and space soon. Not so fast. In order for the real world to catch up to those speeds—and by ‘real world’ we mean live-streaming audio or video between studios, sports venues, and cloud server farms—we’ll need a much more robust IP transport protocol ...

A shout out to the panel of judges and experts who recognized all the hard work we put into our products at last month’s IBC show, and a special thanks to our customers who keep us innovating! Wheatstone won a Radio World Best of Show award at the recent IBC show for the Blade 4, the only AoIP I/O unit to include audio codecs, processing, control, OS, and low latency RIST connectivity in one RU ...

For the upcoming NAB NY show, Wheatstone is demonstrating the WheatNet IP audio network as well as streaming software for provisioning and processing streams on a local server, plus a DMX console system for going from analog to AoIP in a snap, Ethernet switch included. Visit Wheatstone Booth 1212. To register, use our Guest Pass Code NY9284. Tune into our social media channels to experience what’s new in broadcast studios and processing. See you soon! ...

IGMP is part traffic cop, part Jedi for multicast networks. It is the communications protocol used by network routers to ensure that audio goes to where it is needed, and not to where it isn’t needed. Without IGMP, all the audio data in your system would go to every single device that is connected to your network. Every Blade, every console surface, every talent station and computer would receive tons of data that they don’t need, and port flooding would occur. Port flooding leads to packet loss, which results in audio dropouts, missed or sluggish meters/control, and galactic chaos in general. You’ll find What is IGMP and Why You Need It as well as other helpful tips, videos and product information at our new online Wheatstone Support Center, a repository of knowledge and technical information created by our support team ...

Hurricane Helene is on our minds. We live and work in the small coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina. Although our factory was largely unaffected by Hurricane Helene, we are all deeply impacted by the beacons of resiliency demonstrated by our friends in the broadcast industry ...