Sveriges Radio Förvaltnings Selects Four NOA Record Stations

NOA Audio Solutions announced that Sveriges Radio Förvaltnings AB (SRF), which provides technical services to Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio AB (SR), has added four NOA Record stations to its existing NOA mediARC system. The broadcaster is using its extended NOA Record system, part of the NOA Ingest Line, for a new project that will migrate approximately 200,000 hours of analog audio recordings to enable much more readily accessible digital storage over a two-year period.

"Having had more than five years of experience using the NOA Record system for migration purposes, we know its capability very well," said Jorgen Thor, SRF’s technical audio engineer. "Before undertaking this project we performed benchmark measurement and blind listening tests of the integrated NOA N6192 analog-to-digital converter against the market’s top-rated products. The NOA converter demonstrated superior sound quality, and for that reason, we selected it."

The sound recorded by analog systems in the late 1970s and 1980s was extremely high quality, and SR has many unique and irreplaceable recordings from artists from all over the world dating from that era. Deploying the fully equipped NOA Record systems in conjunction with NOA mediARC, SRF will be able to migrate the content of legacy analog tapes into the archive, while simultaneously making it available to the SR staff via the NOA mediARC distributed Web interface. The project is set to begin in February and conclude in 2012.

The NOA Record systems will ingest audio files, which will then be stored and managed by the broadcaster’s existing NOA mediARC digital archive management system. MediARC was developed to meet not only the near-term storage and access needs of broadcast production departments but also to ensure access to cultural heritage in the future.

Designed for seamless integration with the NOA mediARC, the NOA Record system is a combined hardware and software solution that enables simultaneous migration of multiple parallel ingest streams. Operating in pairs, NOA’s N6192 analog-to-digital converters rely on internal digital signal processing (DSP) to continuously check the linearity of both outputs, eliminating even tiny distortions and resulting in an unbeatable dynamic range of 125 dB. The converters also enable features relating to analog input gain, sample rate, DSP filter curves, and output channel to be accessed remotely from within the NOA software.

"NOA offers a turnkey solution for migration of analog recordings to catalogued digital files, incorporating analog-to-digital conversion, quality-controlled audio ingest, sophisticated metadata annotation, and a distributed Web interface that affords desktop access to the stored digital content," said Peter Kuhnle, NOA Audio’s chief technology officer. "Our success in the marketplace derives from our clients’ confidence that NOA knows quality-controlled digital audio archiving and its associated workflows better than anyone else."