Vancouver: On Sept. 19, when rocker Bryan Adams opens Vancouver’s new General Motors Place sports and entertainment complex, the facility will undergo a lot more than just a sound check.

Completely wired with fiber optics, the $163 million, 475,000-square-foot downtown arena is designed for the blending of broadcasting’s current analog age and the oncoming digital age.

This fall, broadcasters will swarm GM Place as the new 20,000-seat home of the Vancouver Canucks franchise of the National Hockey League and the Vancouver Grizzlies expansion team of the National Basketball Association. Other upcoming events include concerts by Boyz II Men, tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and figure skating with Elvis Stojko’s Tour of Champions show.

Arena owner Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment has put together an in-house control room outfitted with a large switcher, a Chyron Max! unit, an Avid editing system, a Tektronix Profile still storage unit and Sony tape decks.

While Orca Bay has sold the rights to broadcast Canucks games to cbc’s Hockey Night in Canada, the company has retained the broadcast rights to the Grizzlies and has a broadcast deal with bctv.

Chris Hebb, Orca Bay’s director of broadcasting, says it will take about five years before full television production for programming such as the Grizzlies games is done within the stadium.

The control room and its 10 technicians will be used, however, to operate the eight-sided Mitsubishi Diamond Vision scoreboard, which cost $6 million. (That price tag is the same as the complete construction cost of the Canucks former home – the pne’s Pacific Coliseum – when it was built 27 years ago.) The 62,000-pound video scoreboard has four full-color screens and four monochrome message boards, and features full-video capabilities for slo-mo replays and other internal transmissions.

Both the scoreboard and broadcasters will benefit from some of the other new and more unusual digital equipment in the control room – the Dixon-brand video clip system that allows the replay of moving pictures off a computer hard disc, and an evs-brand non-tape slo-mo replay system sourced in France.

The evs system will allow a wireless remote video camera to transmit analog signals, convert the signal to digital, record and simultaneously broadcast.

Hebb, a former producer and on-air reporter with bctv, says the evs digital system, in particular, allows the arena some creativity and interactivity with its audiences. He plans to give a young fan attending an event at the stadium a wireless camera and allow him or her to record the event themselves. The unique record and playback system guarantees some safety in the kinds of images that come back to be aired on the scoreboard and general airwaves.

GM Place also features 32 camera bulkheads in areas such as restaurants, concourses, boardrooms and locker rooms where cameras can be plugged directly into the wall instead of the mobile units outside. Says Hebb: ‘If (camera operators) have to use more than 50 feet of cable, I’d say they’re working too hard.’

Each of the arena’s seats has also been wired for interactivity. Though an actual system has not yet been installed, audience members will eventually be able to participate in trivia contests and other interactive events, says Hebb.

And there has been one sacrifice for broadcasting. Because the nba requires play-by-play cameras to be a minimum height from the court, two of the expensive center-line vip suites – otherwise leased to corporations like Coca-Cola and Wood Gundy – were converted into camera bays.