CEDAR Audio’s DNS 2 Helps Power Gibraltar’s National Day Coverage on GBC.

Sitting on the southern tip of Spain, less than 15km from the African continent, Gibraltar is most famous for its imposing limestone rock ridge and its Barbary Macaques – Europe’s only wild monkey population. The Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) has been providing radio and TV services to the 38,000 residents of the British Overseas Territory since December 1963, and offers a variety of news and entertainment content in English, Spanish and Llanito – a vernacular language that is unique to ‘the rock’. Last month, the territory celebrated its National Day, marking the September 1967 sovereignty referendum when 99% of Gibraltarians voted to remain under British rule. The team at GBC always face technical and logistical challenges when covering the festivities, and CEDAR Audio’s DNS 2 has become a vital part of GBC’s technology stack.

Michael Heslegrave supervises the Audio Team at GBC, and has the ultimate responsibility for audio quality when it comes to GBC’s TV and radio output. “I’m constantly looking for ways to improve our audio quality and location sound has always been a big challenge. Gibraltar is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, so you can imagine that background noise is a huge issue for our ENG and OB teams who are out on location on a daily basis. That’s why the CEDAR DNS 2 has been a lifesaver!”

The DNS 2 is a small portable two-channel dialogue noise suppressor that eliminates traffic noise, air conditioning, wind, rain, babble and general background noise from audio signals. It will also help to compensate for unfavourable acoustic conditions and poor microphone placement, and will even suppress excessive reverberation. “I first read about CEDAR’s solutions online”, notes Michael Heslegrave, “and when I spoke to other audio engineers I learned about CEDAR’s expertise and reputation. From the very first phone call to the CEDAR office through to the technical support offered today, the whole experience of dealing with the company has been exceptional. The team really took the time to understand our workflows and our technical concerns, and the products have consistently delivered for us. The DNS 2 is now a consistent part of our daily news coverage and we’ve been using it for some of our more ambitious OB programming, including international football”.

As well as providing clean, intelligible audio during the National Day celebrations, which included music concerts, street parties, speeches and a fireworks display, the DNS 2 units were also used by Heslegrave and team during a week-long TV show in August called ‘Live from The Fair’. “A fairground in summer is extremely noisy and our reporters were in the thick of it! The DNS 2 attenuated the background noise effectively and gave us a very clean audio signal for broadcast. The units have performed flawlessly; incredibly easy to set up and very powerful for their size. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them”.

Although not strictly designed for post-production applications, the DNS 2 has also come in handy when Heslegrave and his team have been dealing with noisier studio environments. “On occasions we’ve used a channel of the DNS 2 as a post-fade insert on a channel, for example where a guest microphone might be picking up air conditioning fan noise or some electrical hum from the lights, or we’ve created a mix bus to send multiple microphones to a channel of the DNS 2 and return to the mixer. Both approaches are very helpful for attenuating background noise effectively and giving us better signal quality. We’ve yet to find a challenging environment that the DNS 2 can’t handle. It’s been a real workhorse in terms of our production workflows and it continues to impress me on a daily basis”.