Coucil Of Europe Selects Marantz PMD Solidstate Recorders For Digital Archive Applications

The Technical Management Department of the Council of Europe has selected Marantz Professional PMD570 and PMD580 solidstate recorders to fulfil its recording and archive requirements throughout its Strasbourg headquarters.
Following an extensive evaluation period, the department decided to replace all of its analogue systems with the Marantz solidstate solution and has purchased 10 PMD570 and 30 PMD580 units.
The PMD recorders supersede an architecture based on professional compact cassette systems. The new systems were supplied and installed by IEC Strasbourg, supported by Alain Mielle, Head of IT and Multimedia at the Council of Europe.
Pascal Papin, Sales and Marketing Director of DMi France, explained: "When IEC's Strasbourg office first contacted me, the PMD580 was not yet commercially available. But we shared the advance product information we had with Eric Hezarifend, Business Sales Engineer, IEC, and agreed that the PMD580 specifications fitted the Council of Europe's requirements perfectly. We had to work really fast to supply IEC within very short deadlines, but due to the fantastic responsiveness of both our IEC's and own teams, we were able to deliver the first PMD580s on time."
The PMD570 and PMD580 are professional 1U rackmount Compact Flash memory card recorder/players, providing non-linear recording, playback and editing and USB file transfer using the highly convenient and secure CF media. Operation is selectable between linear PCM and MP3 formats - providing .WAV and MP3 file types. Bit rates are selectable between 32 and 320 kbps for MP3 recording.
Record start and stop times can be scheduled and a pre-record memory buffer enables recording to be activated at the start of an event. The integrated time and date generator automatically stamps all sessions. Both models feature and RS232 control.
The PMD580 additionally provides fully fledged network capabilities with Ethernet LAN and USB connectivity. Drag and drop file transfer and network remote control, via the PC and Mac compatible web-based GUI, allows users to set menu parameters, schedule recording events, and transfer and archive audio files. Also included are balanced analogue and digital AES/EBU I/Os and selectable 24-bit recording.
The PMD570 and PMED580 architecture was chosen by the Council of Europe to provide robust non linear digital acquisition, playback and storage capabilities, network functionality, ease of operation and a wide range of audio compression settings.
The PMD570 and PMD580s are deployed throughout the Council of Europe to provide recording of Council of Europe meetings, Parliamentary Assembly sessions, European Court of Human Rights hearings, congress meetings and meetings conducted either in dedicated meeting and conference rooms or in the hemicycle.
The council hosts approximately 3,000 meetings a year among 60 meeting rooms and the hemicycle. Recordings are multilingual, often trillingual, comprising the speaker's native language plus French and English. Once recorded, the information is transmitted via the network to the transcription department, after which recordings are archived and preserved as part of the Council of Europe's 'Audio Heritage'. Audio is recorded in MP3 format for conferences and transcriptions and as PCM/.WAV for press release and archival purposes.
The Council of Europe has reported its satisfaction with the Marantz PMD-based architecture and plans to extend this recording management solution to other offices.
(KMcA)