Diamonds Are Forever… And Lawo’s Diamond is (Also) for Radio and TV Broadcast

BY BRETT MOSS

It’s no rough diamond for Lawo. The company’s newly introduced Diamond radio and TV broadcast console is a fully polished desk.

Modular in design, it is scalable from 2 to 60 actual 100 mm touch-sensitive motorized faders with up to 120 virtual faders. Lawo suggests that the smaller units would handle a news operation or edit bay while larger units could be scaled and tasked to production rooms, on-air studios and multiple broadcast studios. All personnel would become familiar with the design’s operation and comfortable no matter where they were in the facility or, within a network’s various properties. Or it can be placed at a small self-op remote studio connected to the internet or into an OB van. 

Fader buckets come in three types: a four-fader unit, a two-fader unit with additional programmable command buttons and a central bucket with gobs of programmable buttons along with the usual multipurpose rotary encoder and little TFT display screens that are on the other buckets. The channel strips contain on/off, mute, PFL, talkback buttons plus access to DSP (controlled by the rotary encoder).

Like most broadcast consoles made these days, the desk is merely a control surface connected to a rackmounted processor, the Lawo Power Core. The connection is Ravenna/AES67 via an Ethernet connector. By using the Power Core, Diamond should be able to settle in within a Lawo Power Core-operated facility or be an upgrade replacement for an older Power Core-powered Lawo console.

In addition there are several extension modules offering even more programmable buttons, or more rotary encoders for controlling input data for things like EQ or a combo of the two. 

The processing engine behind the Diamond is Lawo’s 1 RU Power Core. Lawo says that the Power Core is “capable of 128 bidirectional AoIP streams, and 4 ports for high-density MADI signals (128 total channels of audio) — perfect for native MADI-to-AES67 AoIP conversion.” Furthermore, it complies with the ST2110-30 standard too for operating in combined radio/TV broadcast plants. 

It also offers ST2022-7 Seamless Protection Switching for simultaneous dual-redundant network links. Twin power supplies add to the redundancy. Eight expansion slots provide for a wide variety of I/O: analog source,  mic/line, MADI, AES3, Dante.  

Diamond can be used as a tabletop desk or sunk into a counter and can be styled as a single unit or split-frame. 

Lawo offers athe “Virtual Extension” package featuring its VisTools programmable GUI builder for use with 13.3-inch HD touchscreens mounted to the console or elsewhere. It offers channel strip extension, DSP controls, bar graphs, setting snapshots and more. Diamond also has a special Diamond-only app, Diamond Desktop App which accesses a clock, timer, metering info and user controls.   

And while Diamond is clearly aimed at the radio market, Lawo says that Diamond can also be used as a crossover desk. “Many TV users have found that our radio consoles are well-suited to production applications, where a big live-sound console would be overkill. Knowing this really influenced the design of Diamond,” the company said.

A Lawo spokesperson explains, “The mixing engine is also ST2110-30/31 compliant so that audio can be interchanged between the TV and radio sides of an operation. So some of the new capabilities featured in Diamond were inspired by what TV broadcasters were already doing with our previous radio consoles, and results in a very intuitive workflow whether you’re producing radio or TV.”

Download the in-depth brochure for the deep dig.