Children's Minnesota Minneapolis campus
USA - With two hospital locations, 12 primary care clinics, six rehabilitation centres and nine specialty care sites, Children's Minnesota is one of the largest paediatric health systems in the United States. Star Studio is the hospital's in-house television studio with production spaces located on both the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses. Star Studio programming is shown on Children’s own 24-hour television channel. In addition to pre-recorded programmes, Star Studio also produces 12 live and interactive shows a week.
To increase production efficiencies and to provide better audio quality for the studio's interactive game show programmes and recorded content, Ben Diger, Star Studio broadcast engineer at Children’s Minnesota, began using Dante-enabled equipment and the Dante Via software for the multi-channel routing of computer-based audio.
"With live and pre-recorded content, audio is 80 percent of the experience, and if we have bad audio, no one's going to watch," said Diger. "Producing a show with high-quality, professional audio is a must for us. Dante allows us to do this."
The Dante audio network platform allowed Diger and his team to pull in separate game show audio and music channels, as well as microphone and headphone channels, from a single computer, creating a virtual studio. The team also uses Dante to tie together its intercom system over the network, instead of traditional XLR cabling.
With Dante Domain Manager, Star Studio’s audio is efficiently integrated into a single, manageable and secure audio over IP network that won't disrupt or delay any of the hospital's audio needs. The result is a high-quality, efficient digital audio integration that helps keep hospital programming engaging and entertaining.
"Dante Domain Manager perfectly streamlines our workflow by allowing us to access any of our audio sources and destinations from anywhere in our hospitals," said Diger. "Whether it be on our Minneapolis campus or our St. Paul campus, we're able to pull in our program feed or microphones to any of our studios."
(Jim Evans)

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