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Crystal Vision adds new audio features to its fail-safe routing switch

The M-SAFESWITCH-2 fail-safe routing switch has gained a significant new feature to help keep broadcasters on air. The new per channel audio monitoring and switching feature now makes the M-SAFESWITCH-2 Crystal Vision’s most comprehensive switching solution for those that care about audio failures. Ideal for planned maintenance switches or as a very sophisticated auto changeover switch and including two independent 2 x 1 switches, the M-SAFESWITCH-2 will guarantee a clean switch for sources that are IP (ST 2022 or ST 2110 video), SDI or a mixture of both and can select from ten different fault conditions to automatically trigger a switch. Because the M-SAFESWITCH-2 is a software app that runs on the MARBLE-V1 media processor hardware – a card which features a powerful CPU/GPU processor and both SDI and 10GbE IP network interface connections – this customer-requested new feature could be added quickly and easily.

The new audio features – which work with both SDI and ST 2022 – make it easy for a broadcaster to detect problems with their audio channels and, if required, trigger a switch to the backup input. With the new audio monitoring, it is now possible to monitor for audio group present, channels within the audio group present and channels within the audio group present but silent. The M-SAFESWITCH-2’s new audio switching parameters are Audio all selected missing, Audio any selected missing, Audio all selected silent and Audio any selected silent – meaning that a switch can now be triggered if any or all of the selected audio channels are missing or are silent. A delay can be added before silence is detected to cater for any permitted silence in the program. The other six fault conditions that can be selected to automatically trigger a switch are input missing, input video standard incorrect, active video black, active video frozen, video error and network error.

Explained Crystal Vision’s Managing Director, Philip Scofield: “This latest update gives broadcasters one more reason to use the M-SAFESWITCH-2 in the critical areas of their broadcast chain, whether IP, SDI or a mixture of both.”

The M-SAFESWITCH-2 is a product that has benefited from three additional customer-requested extra features recently – all added easily thanks to MARBLE being a software-based platform. To ensure there is no disruption to the output picture when a switch takes place, the M-SAFESWITCH-2 uses its framestore synchronizers plus the ability to delay the earliest arriving input by up to ten frames to correct any timing differences between the inputs. A customer wanted to use the M-SAFESWITCH-2 to bypass its graphics system – with these systems often prone to long delays – and therefore requested the ability to delay Source B on each switch by up to an additional 60 frames, a feature which has now been added. There may be known and accepted upstream events which can occur in a system and the next customer-requested new feature allows switch tolerance to be set, where errors are permitted to occur for a certain amount of frames before the switch to Source B triggers. The final new feature is the addition of a third output, which is fixed as IP – with the customer who requested this feature needing two SDI outputs (one for local monitoring) and one IP output.

All the M-SAFESWITCH-2 new features are available now.

Based at Whittlesford near Cambridge in the UK and with an office in the USA, Crystal Vision provides a full range of interface and keyers and helps people transition through a range of technologies – from SD to HD, from HD to IP and from IP to IP.

www.crystalvision.tv

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