Audio Processing: Your Ears vs. Specs and Features

I once heard a story regarding a certain ski team during one of the Olympic Games. Not sure if it is true or not, but it went something like this: This team was determined to be the first ski team from their country to bring home some medals. They studied every book about skiing. They read up on the proper techniques, equipment, stance, timing - everything.  Later they practiced on simulators. On the flight to the Olympic Games they were already counting their medals. Only one problem: They never actually skied on an Olympic course before! They hardly skied at all on any course.

RIP John Karlin, Father of Modern Telephone Dialing

At Telos, phones are, quite naturally, rather dear to our hearts. Just days ago came the news that John Karlin, a veteran of Bell Labs and the man directly responsible for All-Digit Dialing and, indirectly, DTMF and the modern telephone keypad, passed away on January 28 at the age of 94. Without Karlin, much of the UI common to modern communications would likely come in a much different form.

Zap! Boom! Pow! The Rise and Fall of the Amusement Arcade

Many of us grew up spending our Friday nights pumping dimes and quarters into pinball machines or Space Invaders games down at the local arcade. These arcades served as sanctums, meeting places, king's courts and on-the-job-training for a lot of budding teen electrical engineers (and a lot of others, too). Now, these places are pretty much gone, sanitized out of existence or supplanted by the rise of the console game and the embrace of the living room couch. Ah, but there was a time...

Axia Socks It to 'Em

Don't try this at home, folks

As part of our relentless monitoring of the Interwebs, the Telos Alliance Marketing gnomes came across this post on Pubtech, the Public Radio Technical listserve, from Doug Hoag of KAXE in Grand Rapids, Minnesota:

KQ103 Rocks Orlando with Omnia.11

Sometimes, it takes a little trying, a little sampling of various options, before the right choice presents itself. In this case, the subject is audio processing. It took some time, but after extensive, on-air comparisons of all processing options, Orlando's WHKQ (KQ103) has decided on the Omnia.11 as their final choice. "We tried others, but we're keeping the Omnia.11" says Bill Sullivan, KQ103's chief engineer. "We are most impressed with the clarity of this unit."

Topics: broadcast audio processor

KVMR has IP Remotes Z/IP-ped up tight

Concert remotes over IP? Yes you can!

Even though IP connections for remotes are becoming more and more common, some broadcasters have preferred to stay with ISDN for critical live shows. And that's fine... but what if you can't get ISDN any more? Or the telco demurs when you ask for a line drop in an out-of-the-way location?

IP-Audio Connections Using N/ACIP

Radio engineers are turning to IP-based infrastructure and connectivity for streaming audio between studios and other sites. Indeed, as ISDN and, more recently, even "real" POTS connections are disappearing, we're turning to the same technology we use for e-mail, web, and file transfer - Internet Protocol - "IP."

Cabling for Audio Networks: How to Save Time, Money and Trouble by Forgetting What You Know

If you’re getting ready to jump into AoIP networking – whether it’s building a whole new physical plant, retrofitting existing studios or constructing a distribution network for otherwise analog facilities – there is one thing you can do to simplify your life immensely: forget what you know about wiring an analog facility.

Many engineers, when they first begin planning a networked installation, still think in Analog mode. What I mean is, they develop the wiring plan for their IP-networked plant while still thinking in terms of discrete audio pairs, home runs, and centralized switching. We’ve actually seen new studios, with IP-Audio routing, wired the old-fashioned way – using punch blocks and shielded-pair cable to feed signals to a central core switch.

Retiring a king, and crowning a new one

There are probably very few broadcasters active today who haven’t used a Telos ONE hybrid at one time or another. After all, they’re everywhere – newsrooms, remote vans, editing booths, conference rooms, production suites, home studios; you name it. So it’s worth a tip of the hat as the ONE, a watershed product that’s served broadcasters well since 1993, rides off into the sunset.

There were several factors that made Telos ONE a radio favorite. ONE hybrids sound superb, and were the lowest-priced auto-nulling all-digital hybrids on the market for many years. The combination of our Digital Dynamic EQ (a DSP implementation which became rightly famous), digital acoustic ducking to help talent better control the conversation, and a genius way of using the input as a control signal for output gain processing, made the ONE a hard number to beat.

Love and Rockets, Cleveland style

All of us at the Telos Alliance share with our clients a fatal attraction to broadcasting, as well as a passion for making great audio. But many of us have other hobbies and interests that might surprise you. From time to time, we'll profile members of the Telos Alliance and what they do when they're not inventing the next generation of broadcast audio gear.