KOMO-DT wins Broadcast Engineering Excellence Award

Earlier this year, Wheatstone Corporation in conjunction with KOMO-DT in Seattle submitted the station’s recently redesigned facility for the Broadcast Engineering magazine “Excellence Award.” Today, we’re proud to say that the KOMO facility has won that award in the “New Studio Technology – HD” category. The presentation was made by Broadcast Engineering Editor-in-Chief Susan Anderson at NAB 2012.


KOMO’s facility includes the Wheatstone Dimension One, a network-based console that represents the state of the art in television audio control. The audio console replacement was part of a complete facility rebuild made necessary by both technological advances and timing.

“In addition to the need for HD capability, much of our key equipment was reaching end-of-life, and would soon not be well supported by its manufacturers,” said KOMO engineer John Reynolds.

While having a modern, HD-capable console was a priority for the station, another was usability. The audio console already in place had been considered very complicated and difficult to operate, and an alternative that was both stable and easy to use was needed. Dimension One offered the best fit in terms of price, flexibility, and power.

The console is controlled both manually and through Sony’s ELC automation system, which is capable of controlling all 48 logical faders.

KOMO Award_NAB2012KOMO’s new facility went online on October 8, 2011, and since then, operators have found the console’s operation to be extremely simple and straightforward, says Reynolds, “and it’s by far the most stable console we’ve worked with.”

“The greatest part of the Wheatstone experience,” says Brett Jungbluth, Systems Engineer, “was the simplicity. Because there was so much to do in getting this facility ready for air, we had very little time to spend in training with Wheatstone. The other side of the coin is that the simplicity of the console’s operation meant that we actually needed less training.”

You can read the article and see a photo of the KOMO facility at Broadcast Engineering’s web site.

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