Egypt's State Broadcaster Chooses AEQ Conexia Intercom

The Egyptian National Media Authority (ENMA), the state broadcaster established in 1945, has selected AEQ's CONEXIA intercom platform for its Cairo headquarters after an international tender.

ENMA is one of the largest and most influential media organisations in the Middle East and Africa, and is a member of bodies including the EBU and ASBU.

ENMA operates 19 standalone radio services spanning national, international, regional and thematic stations, alongside a television portfolio of three national channels, one international channel and six regional channels. Its operations are based in Cairo's landmark Maspero building on the Nile, a fixture of the city skyline topped with transmission antennas.

Following many years running a KROMA Telecom digital intercom, ENMA's Technical Department has opted for AEQ's CONEXIA system, deploying TP9000‑series user panels. The project reflects the scale and complexity of ENMA’s headquarters, one of the region’s key broadcast centres.

AEQ's intercom technology is designed to let users share resources, streamline workflows and control productions on robust, high‑reliability systems with built‑in redundancy, while delivering broadcast‑grade audio and advanced signal processing. Based on AoIP audio networks with centralised control, the platform aims to simplify end‑to‑end content management in demanding production environments.

At the core of CONEXIA is AEQ’s XCORE intercom matrix, which can interconnect up to 1,000 devices. The installation at ENMA includes full redundancy on the central matrix with dual power supplies, N+1 redundant DSP, and multiple controllers to ensure high availability. In total, 128 AEQ TP9116 intercom panels with colour displays and multiple operating levers are being distributed across the building’s 25 floors.

CONEXIA is built around a broadcast audio matrix that supports today’s principal audio formats in a fully modular way, allowing resources to be tailored to system needs at any time. Its design enables end‑to‑end redundancy, including automatic backup for controllers, audio processing cards, crosspoints and even multichannel or discrete I/O cards. An internal TDM bus scales to a 1,024 x 1,024 port matrix.

The platform provides broadcast audio quality at 48 kHz/24‑bit, combining flexibility and robustness for intercom and wider audio management tasks. The XCORE matrix is housed in a 4U chassis divided into three sections: a front bank of up to 20 DSP card slots for processing and crosspoints, with dynamic allocation and automatic switchover to backup cards; rear slots comprising two controller positions (with redundancy) and 21 I/O card positions supporting SDI, fibre, AoIP, and analogue or digital audio; and a central backplane that interconnects modules and carries the 1,024‑channel TDM bus. The CONEXIA Master layer provides higher‑level control, distributing crosspoint commands according to the user configuration map.

AEQ’s TP9000‑series user panels are engineered for broadcast compatibility with CONEXIA and CrossNET matrices. Audio is digitised and processed at 24‑bit/48 kHz with a 20 Hz–20 kHz bandwidth and negligible distortion and noise. With the EP9116 expansion, systems can be configured with up to 64 physical levers. Installation is simplified by IP connectivity, including Dante audio compatible with AES67, alongside analogue, KROMA digital and VoIP ports. An internal DSP provides acoustic echo cancellation and automatic normalisation of level, tone and speech habits per operator, and the acoustics have been tuned for intelligibility and natural sound.

The AEQ TP9116 panels provide 'Talk' and 'Listen' functions and individual volume control per communication point via four‑way toggle keys, with 16 crosspoint keys across four pages, supported by four RGB graphic displays. The front panel includes a gooseneck electret microphone, internal loudspeaker and Mini‑XLR headset connector. The TP9000 family comprises the TP9116 rack panel, TP9416 desktop panel and EP9116 expansion panel.

ENMA's technical engineering, projects and operations teams led the deployment in collaboration with AEQ’s central services in Madrid and local partner WHASH.

aeq.eu