Things at work are wild lately. The station recently purchased an astonishingly expensive digital broadcast console, so it’s out with the old (also astonishingly expensive) analog mixer, and in with the new. Of course, that’s much more easily said than done. In fact, it is so uneasily done that the process has taken weeks of preparation.
Now, with the ball in unstoppable motion, the engineers at the station, Manis and Tim, have Master Control–the room where all the magic happens–turned upside down. This week we’re broadcasting from Control Room 7, a tiny place in a back corner of our facility which we generally only use for training and production. I am used to recording all my PSAs in there, but running a show is another matter entirely.
What CR7 lacks that I take for granted in Master Control:
- Auto-fire CD players, which start the disc when I press a button on the mixer
- Back-lighted buttons, so I can tell for sure when a channel is on or off
- Separate faders for the network and each wave-cart, so I don’t have to use A/B switches
- A practical talk-back system
- NOAA weather / EAS machinery
- Square footage
Don’t get me wrong; we are fortunate to have such wonderful facilities, and CR7 serves a vital purpose. But, aside from Bill Beckett, our program director, nobody is especially proficient in its use. Therefore, directing the news from CR7 poses some interesting challenges, some of which we hadn’t even anticipated. The worst of the unexpected obstacles was discovered Monday, when the microphones in the dialog studio didn’t work when we were live. It turned out that the phantom power that supplied them came from the old mixer in MCR, and with that board removed, the microphones had no signal. The mixer in CR7 can’t supply phantom power, apparently, so we had to get some dynamic mics in there quickly.
So that’s the downside. The upside is that it is different, and exciting, and considering how nice the people are that I work with, still a fun place to be.
Filed under: Technology, Work on July 18th, 2007 | No Comments »