Bahrain Radio begins its journey into the digital world with Lawo’s VSM

Bahrain Radio’s seven stations, inaugurated in 1980, have decided to renovate with a selection of Lawo technology, including Vistool and VSM.

The entire facility has been upgraded: from the nine radio studios and control rooms to the MCR (Master Control Room) and CAR (Central Apparatus Room), with a parallel overhaul of furniture, equipment, automation systems, radio library and acoustics. Thanks to the implementation of digital solutions in all areas of the facility, the radio section of the Ministry of Information Affairs (MIA) has left the analog environment.

The installation is based on a MADI architecture supported by Lawo products that covers all seven broadcast studios and allows the control room to function as a stand-alone studio. These broadcast studios can also be connected to two of the production studios for music or theater projects, while a third production studio has been redesigned for mixing and mastering.

MCR, with Lawo solutions

The MCR, the heart of the station, now includes a 15-station FM automation system with full redundancy, which will allow the department to expand its capacity in the future and add another six FM stations. It also features four 80” LED panels, Lawo’s Vistool solution for audio monitoring and Lawo’s VSM monitoring tool. In parallel, the Dalet software has been replaced by a radio automation system from RCS.

The studios are connected to the MCR via fiber (MADI) with physical AES/ANA cables for redundancy. The CAR was also designed with a Lawo centralized audio router (MADI).

Challenges set by Covid-19

GloCom, a Dubai-based system integrator, was the company tasked with leading the project. While it carefully planned the entire integration, Covid-19 presented several challenges, as its president and director Zahid Mirza points out, “This project was contracted to us in October 2019, but Covid-19 resulted in severe challenges in terms of shipments, permits to work on-site and so on – but we worked closely with the customer and our logistics team to circumvent this.”

Despite these obstacles, the project, signed in October 2020, was delivered on time: “With our highly qualified engineers, and with support of the MIA team, we succeeded. […] With the successful integration of the RCS automation and Lawo, all the stations played the Azan on time for one calendar year, without any delay.”