This Week In Radio Tech (TWiRT)

Connecting remote talent to the studio has come a long way since dial-up phone lines, frequency extenders, and even since ISDN codecs. One method is Cleanfeed, an online service that uses WebRTC in the browser. Marc Bakos is co-founder of Cleanfeed.net and joins us to explain the tech and its uses for broadcasters and podcasters.

What does a station owner do when there are live broadcasts to be done, but no one is available to run the board at the studio? Steve Rubin, CEO of Rubin Broadcasting, runs his stations from his kitchen at home. He screens phone calls, runs live football broadcasts and sales remotes, and even puts himself live on-air when needed. What’s his secret? We’ll find out!

Hebdon Bridge in West Yorkshire, England, is considered by many to be the birthplace of the industrial revolution. It’s also home to Calrec Audio, makers of audio mixing consoles for TV and radio. Henry Goodman is Product Development Director at Calrec, and joins us to discuss to move to SMPTE 2110-30 and AES67 networked audio.

If you went to NAB 2019 in Las Vegas, there’s no way you got to see everything you wanted to see. And if you didn’t get to NAB, you missed a lot. Chris Tobin and Kirk Harnack explored some compelling technology and products on the show floor. Check the out!

Broadcast infrastructure virtualization: Twelve syllables that represent a dizzying variety of implementations. Sean Kelly, founder of Seagull.fm in Exeter, Torbay, and South Devon England, is enabling local presenters and other contributors to be on-air, live from their homes and small studios. Building a virtualized backend infrastructure has been a key element to the reliability and usability of Sean’s broadcast workflow. Sean reveals both rationale and technical details on this episode of TWiRT.

Ken Heron is a radio guy. We know this because he has a VU meters, a tower, and the call letters of every station he’s ever worked at tattooed on his left arm. His right arm tattoos include a transmitter schematic diagram! But Ken is also here to talk about drones and putting them to good use - for fun, art, and a new perspective.

More than a few radio stations have been “done in” by not being able to recover after a disaster. A cluster of Florida radio stations never returned to air after Hurricane Michael. While some disasters can result in a total loss, Chris Tobin and Joe Talbot bring advice for recovering from two of the most common outages affecting broadcasters. They’ve both worked through numerous disasters and their planning made the difference in a quick recovery.

Nashville, Tennessee, is known not only Country music, but for the early studios that recorded Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Brenda Lee, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. Some of the first recording engineers worked full-time at WSM and other radio stations. Our guest, Mike Porter, shows us the microphones used in recording some of the most familiar and popular songs in history, and takes us on a tour of Columbia Studio A and Studio B - the Quonset Hut - on Nashville’s Music Square.

When PC-based music playout systems became popular in the mid-1990’s, it was small and medium market radio stations that were quick to adopt. Now, almost 25 years later, more broadcasters are finding value and reliability in virtualizing their broadcast infrastructure. From business admin to sales to audio operations, virtualizing dozens of PC onto a a couple of servers (with full redundancy) is making sense. Kevin Buente, Chief Engineer for WHIZ Media Group in Zanesville, Ohio, joins us to talk about virtualizing AM, FM, and TV operations in a small market.

One may reasonably argue that broadcast equipment is more reliable and stable now than ever before. One reason is the broad use of general purpose computing platforms and the same networking infrastructure as the huge IT industry uses. Peter Femal optimizes these ubiquitous technologies for reliable broadcast service. We discuss Audio over IP redundancies, as well as more traditional backup systems. And, as Peter says, “It’s not a backup if you don’t trust it.”