Vintage Audio: Cathode Ray Tubes and a Buick Straight-8

If you've been reading our content long enough, you know that we love old broadcast tech. There's nothing like watching something made in the Streamline Moderne era make broadcast media from, as Spock once opined, "stone knives and bearskins."

ATAs, FXS and SIP - Oh My!

Learning about VoIP? Here's a site that can help

More and more radio engineers are jumping into the world of VoIP telephony. It's no easy task, sorting the jumble of acronyms and alphabet soup that make up the VoIP lexicon. What's an FXO, and will it work with my DID setup? Where do I find a list of SIP response codes? And do I need to worry about IAX, or not?

Happy Birthday to the Xbox's great, great, great, great, great granddaddy

The brain trust at MIT have been responsible for quite a few innovations over the course of 151 years (1861 being the date of its founding). Famous grads include William Shockley, part of the Bell Labs team that invented the transistor, Ray Tomlinson, who developed e-mail on Arpanet, Bill Hewlett of HP fame, and Bob Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. But this year, another product of an MIT graduate turned 50 years old: the computer game.

Axia Helps Merlin Media Flip Formats Fast

Radio folks know that format changes usually mean equipment changes as well. Especially when you're going from music to talk - that's a real game-changer. When Merlin Media recently acquired Chicago's WWWN from Emmis, they decided to make the flip - but on a very short timetable: Merlin wanted the studios finished in one month to put their new format on the air.

Is your AM Audio Quality Lost in Translation?

Omnia can help

Our US readers may have noticed recently a number of AM stations filing for and obtaining translators to help boost signal coverage. Maybe you've even applied for one of your own. That's thanks to the FCC's Report and Order from 2009 that allowed cross-service translation (the ability for AMs to rebroadcast on an FM frequency).

Topics: broadcast audio processor

Do you Need Audio Processing in a File-based Encoder?

That question comes up on a regular basis.

The first answer that comes to mind is “because it’s cool!” but, on a more serious note, there are some very practical reasons for it.

What IP-Audio Studio Owners Discover after their First Installation

The boxes have come and gone, as well as the integrator. The past few months have been both exciting and tedious, as you've had to not only plan and install new technology into your existing facility, but also keep up on all of the other engineering responsibilities — a challenge that every broadcast engineer can relate and sympathize with. Now you've got it, though: your first AoIP studio. So, what's next?

Four "Must-Dos" for Planning Your IP-Audio network

Although most engineers have some experience with computer networks, not all of us have had to build one from scratch. If you're planning for an Axia IP-Audio network (or maybe you've just purchased some Axia gear), here are four things you should do to help ensure that the audio network you're planning performs the way you want it to.

What do Explosives, Flashlights, and Toy Trains Have in Common?

Those of us who came of age at a certain time will fondly remember one of the traditional joys of our youth: setting up the electric train beneath the Christmas tree. Not just any train, though - it had to be a Lionel train set, big and loud and bright, complete with billowing smoke from the locomotive and all manner of animated trackside accessories.

Five things your competition is doing to sound better than you

Garbage in – garbage out; especially true when playing your music through a modern, hard-working audio processor. Stations that sound great play music that sounds great. This means the source material is as close to perfect as possible. No MP3s. No downloading songs using BitTorrent. With the cost of hard drive storage being so low these days, there’s no excuse for not ripping and storing your music library in a linear format – no bit-rate-reduction (data compression). If you must obtain data-compressed music, be sure it’s at a high bit rate. 256kbps minimum for AAC; 384 kbps minimum for MPEG Layer II. Check your songs for full frequency response using spectral analysis; you can connect a PC with a good sound card to your console output and watch for songs limited to 15kHz or less. Replace these cuts as you can. YOU are the final gatekeeper of your station’s source material integrity.