Thunder City Pro Puts Calrec at Heart of Mobile Units

St. Petersburg, FL (October 17, 2024)—St. Petersburg, Florida-based design, integration, production, sales and rental company Thunder City Pro has put Calrec’s modular Type R mixing system at the heart of its range of BOLT mobile production units.

According to Justin Stancil, Thunder City Pro’s president, “We needed a compact, yet powerful audio console with plenty of customizable screen real estate, and the Type R is the perfect mix of compact modularity and expandability. Not only can we license the console with precisely the amount of DSP resources we need, but its processing core hardware is exactly the same no matter how it is licensed.

“Furthermore, having the flexibility of adding or re-arranging hardware panels really makes the platform future proof, and it is expandable when the client is ready to grow. Its modular PoE panels also make it easy to adapt to any number of configurations; we can easily and cleanly install any combination of Large Soft Panel, Small Soft Panel and Type R fader panels to meet the specific needs of any client.”

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Thunder City Pro, whose customers range from the University of South Florida to Major League Baseball teams like the Tampa Bay Rays and the Baltimore Orioles, offers custom design services and can design a custom mobile unit to meet the requirements of all clients. Developed for content producers seeking smaller production vehicles with no compromise on features, BOLT is designed to be cost-effective to build and run, and is available in compact 16-, 24- and 32-foot models. Capable of covering everything from live sporting events and concerts to corporate conferences, BOLT can be ordered with a pre-designed floor plan, pre-integrated with equipment.

“We love that Type R is SMPTE 2110 native, but Calrec’s modular I/O also makes it easy to interface with other audio flavors such as MADI, Dante, AES, and analogue,” Stancil says. “Calrec’s modular I/O includes MADI and Dante cards, which means while the link between the core and modular I/O is native IP, we can take de-embedded audio into the Type R from our Evertz NEXX router, and embed audio into the NEXX router from the Type R.

“We can use Dante to link analogue audio to the digital Dante I/O that is deployed in the field, while Calrec’s crosspoint router can act as an audio router in addition to the NEXX router. It means we can route between MADI, Dante, and the console without necessarily having to use DSP resources.”