Tech Support, This is Ted

On This Week in Radio Tech, Ted Alexander joins Chris Tobin and me, Kirk Harnack. Ted got started in radio way too early - like as a baby! He’s hosted popular shows on-air, plus engineered some pretty big iron. And you may have talked with Ted when calling for Tech Support from Telos! See if Ted tells a Support story about you!

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Kirk: This Week in Radio Tech episode 244 is brought to you by Axia Audio and the new Fusion AOIP Mixing Console, packed with features refined from over a decade of IP audio experience; by the Telos ProSTREAM X2 and 9X2 Audio Processing and Stream Encoding software, with adaptive streaming technology; and by Lawo and the new Crystal Clear Virtual Radio Console. Crystal Clear is the radio console with the multi-touch touchscreen interface.

On this week in Radio Tech, Ted Alexander joins Chris Tobin and me, Kirk Harnack. Ted got started in Radio way too early, like, as a baby, really. He's hosted popular shows on air, plus engineered some pretty big [inaudible 00:00:42], and you may have talked with Ted when calling for tech support from Telos. See if Ted tells a support story about you.

Hey, welcome in to This Week in Radio Tech. It's the show where we talk about everything form the microphone to the light bulb at the top of the office, which I do have one in my office. It's just over yonder. I've got to get it behind me and let you see that thing again sometime. I'm Kirk Harnack, your host. Glad to be here. I work for the folks at Telos, and I own some radio stations. Well, I'm part owner. I own the part that doesn't make any money, but that's okay. We'll have a great time with them anyway.

Hey, we've been doing this show for a long time. It's our 244th episode. Also with us on the show, the best-dressed engineer in radio digging out from what, six, seven inches of snow? It is Chris Tobin in Manhattan. Hey Chris, how you doing man?

Chris: Hello, Kirk. Actually, here in the city, we had about four inches at best, so the six inches plus was out in Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau County, Suffolk County, and parts of Western New Jersey. That's about it, so blizzard it was not.

Kirk: For those of you who didn't hear the pre-show, if you are watching this, the problem with Chris Tobin's video feed is that it's frozen. It is so cold in New York that it is frozen and only a couple of frames are getting through, but we've got a guest who is going to take up most of our time. I am delighted about our guest being here. This is a fellow I've known, I think, since about the mid-nineties. I think I met Ted in the mid-nineties when I worked at Scott Studios. Let's bring him on. It's Ted Alexander.

Ted: Hey, Kirk.

Kirk: He is checking in from home. Hey Ted. He's a support engineer for the folks at the Telos Alliance. Ted, welcome in. Glad you are here.

Ted: Good to be here. Good to be here. Just wanted to say hi to everybody who talks to me at the Telos Alliance. I get some of the most entertaining calls of my life from people who call up for tech support. Talking about radio and television stuff, what could be better?

Kirk: That's what we are going to talk about. We've got a commercial to take care of to help pay for the show, but when we get back from that, we'll be talking to Ted about-Ted is fascinating person. You could not have enough lunches or dinners with this guy. You would be entertained the whole time, every time with his stories if you are an engineer, if you appreciate the way we used to do radio, if you appreciate oldies and being on-the-air, and if you appreciate good stories about how to troubleshoot and fix gear, Ted is your guy. You can tell I am excited about having him on the show. I really am.

Our show is brought to you in part by the folks at Axia and the brand-new, now shipping Fusion Audio Console. We are going to roll a little, short, two-and-a-half minute bit here with Clark Novak. Let's see what Clark has to tell us about the Axia Fusion Console. Hang on. Well, it looks like our audio is not there and the video is kind of jerky, so while the video plays I'll-[inaudible 00:03:53] if you want to roll that, I can talk about what Clark is showing us there. The Fusion is a console that has design features out the Yin-Yang. The folks at Axia - the engineers there - have literally taken everything they have learned in a dozen years of making Audio over IP consoles and put those things into the Fusion Console.

It's a brand-new console from Axia. It has a lot of the features of the Element console, but a lot of things are redesigned as well. For example, beautiful OLED displays at the top of every fader. They look great. You can see them from across the room. You can see them very, very clearly. The faders are still using these beautiful, linear faders that are what we call "side-loading faders" not top-loading. Every other console on the market has these top-loading faders, and you drop a piece of dirt in there-a hair, anything like that-and it gets into the fader. Our faders at Axia are side-loading, and that means that dirt doesn't just drop into the fader. It goes around the fader. Faders last much, much longer.

All the switches are from the aerospace industry. They are tested literally millions of times-well, not the ones that you get. The other ones are tested. We don't actually wear out the ones that you get on the console. Every single backlight is LED, so it's not light bulbs. They are not going to burn out, not in your lifetime, anyway, and the entire console is made of extruded aluminum-machined and extruded-not bent, metal panels. Those have no place in this console. This all extruded aluminum, very solid-has an incredibly solid feel to it.

I think I did a demo one time where I actually stood on top of this console. It's really amazing. You see in there now every single fader has meters built into it, so you can see your pre-fader levels, and if you are doing a talkback to some place, if you are doing an IFB feed or sending a mix-minus, you can see that mix-minus as well. Soft knobs there let you select sources and adjust pre-fader levels coming in. It's just a gorgeous console, and it's available in almost any size you need from as small as-I believe two faders, maybe four faders-really small up to forty faders. Oh, there's that side-loading fader. Nobody else has that. It's just an amazing device.

Really, we have a very low failure rate, even on consoles using these that are, what, on the order of nine years old, ten years old. We just don't see failures. There's Clark finishing up talking about it. This video from Clark and a number of others are available on YouTube, and they are also linked at the Telos website, if you go to telosalliance.com and click on the Axia IP Audio Consoles, you'll see the Fusion, and you can check out the videos.

Clark has a series of four videos. They are each about four minutes long or so, and they tell all about how the Fusion was developed, the convenience features in the Fusion, how it helps your workflow, and how gorgeous the console is. Check it out if you would, and thanks a lot to the folks at Axia for sponsoring This Week in Radio Tech. Again, that website: telosalliance.com. You can still go to the Axia Audio site, axiaaudio.com, and get it there as well.

All right, here we are with Chris Tobin in Manhattan and Ted Alexander. Ted, I'm going to ask you a simple question and I'll cut you off if I need to. I want to know how you got started in broadcast engineering, because man, you've been doing this a long time, and you're good at it.

Ted: Well, remember that old, Bill Cosby thing? One of his first albums said, "I started out as a child." Well, I actually did, and I guess it's unusual, and they said I'm not crazy, and it's been confirmed by my parents: before I could walk, I was fascinated with this box that sounds came out of. This was before we got our T.V.

I was born in 1946, so I'm talking about Christmastime 1946, early 1947, I have a memory wearing a beige sweater with these tortoise shell-type buttons on it, and as a kid I can remember-as a baby, I can remember looking up and seeing these appendages that I could almost control, and I thought if I could push this button on my shirt, radio would come out of it. I have absolutely photographic memory of that, and years later, when I was in a playpen, there were little things that you twisted on-little rattles and stuff-I thought they were radio knobs and I never lost my fascination from it.

Kirk: Okay, so there's an early age of getting interested, now did you build kits, or get parts together and build stuff, maybe, when you were in middle school or high school?

Ted: No, this goes back to early grade school. Somebody had this little, battery-operated tube-because there wasn't much solid-state stuff at the time. The transistor was only invented about three or four years before this - a little radio, and the front panel didn't work on it. So, I started digging around in it and I found this thing with plates on it and learned later it was a variable capacitor, and if you moved this, you could get different radio stations. In the dark, if you looked in there when you turned it on, you could see this little, hair-thin filament glowing in these radio tubes, like a 1R5 or something or other.

I spent countless hours tuning around it, running around the batteries, "Mommy, Daddy, buy a new battery for the radio!" It used a 67.5 volt battery, and just a couple of years after that, I got one of these radio kits. I still remember the tube. It was a 3Q4. It had a 22.5 volt B battery, and I think it was like two C cells or D cells for the filament. With it, you could make a radio, you could make an amplifier, you could make an oscillator which would transmit to your radio and get you all of about 10 feet with it. That really kind of started it off. We weren't rich, we weren't broke. It was a nice, middle-class upbringing, but nobody else in my family was interested in the radio.

I would go to the library. I was an avid reader as a kid. I would find every radio book I could find, and I started looking at these terms. "Amplitude modulation"-what does that mean? Queue of circuits, that came a little bit later. Anything that sounded like radio, but I always wanted to be the guy that would make radio, that would make music and voice come out of some other person's radio.

When I was about nine or ten years old, someone gave me a radio that was wrecked. It just didn't work. They say it didn't work. It was an All-American Five AC/DC Radio. It was a high chassis radio. I looked at it, and I don't know how I understood it, but the tubes were out of order, so I changed the tubes' order. The radio started working.

I used it as a radio for a while, and then in this radio book, I was reading, "If you take an amplifier and you put the audio onto the plate of an RF tube, you could modulate it." I took this radio, disassembled it as a radio, took the local oscillator, fed that into the grid of the IF tube, connected to the audio tube-no RF chokes, no tuned circuits, nothing, but somehow or another were connected to the audio tube to the plate of the IF tube-I had a little AM transmitter that got about 100 feet. It was so distorted, you could hardly understand what it was. Then, my interest in amateur radio had been growing ever since then. One of the kids in grade school's dad was a HAM.

By the time I was getting into about the seventh or eighth grade level, I was seriously interested in HAM radio, got my license when I was thirteen, got my first phone back when I was in high school, all of this with the help of the Radio Club, and kind of on my own. The first phone got me into the door of the radio stations, and I've never been able to completely separate the engineering from the on-air. Both of them have been loves of mine, and most of the places that I've worked, I've been able to do both simultaneously from the tiny stations to the big guys.

Kirk: You know, most of our conversation is going to center around engineering, but let's talk for a minute about the on-air thing, because you've been a popular personality in Cleveland. What got you into that and what became your specialty with on-air programming and being behind the mic yourself?

Ted: Well, I grew up listening-I can remember listening to Alan Fried on the radio. He was here in Cleveland back in the early fifties. Some of the other Cleveland personalities: there was Pete "Mad Daddy" Myers, who later went on to Ten-Ten Wins in New York. Johnny Holiday was a Cleveland Personality. Jim Runyon, Jim Stag, Jerry G. Bishop, Ron Britain, they all worked in Cleveland. I remember as a grade school kid, Casey Kasem had a very short-lived show on both radio and television here in Cleveland, and whenever they did a remote broadcast that was within about five miles of my house, I would ride my bike up to it. I was twelve or thirteen years old and couldn't drive yet.

I went up and I met Casey when he was on WJW here in Cleveland. An interesting story about that: WJW then became, after a succession of call letters, WRMR, and I happened to be doing an afternoon shift there. I played a record called "The Angels Listened In" by The Crests, and I remember hearing it for the first time when Casey premiered it on WJW back in about 1959. I mentioned that fact on the air. Casey's lawyer called me up and said, "That's so nice of you to remember him. I'm going to tell Casey about that." A couple of days later, I got a personal thank-you note for remembering him on the Cleveland radio station where he was.

It was just one of those kind of neat things. I've always liked to be the guy on the radio, talking, as well as the guy that knows how to set up a transmitter and make it reach out, like an umbrella, over all these people. It's just this fascination that I've had. Imagine taking this little microphone or looking down at a record. You've seen this stylus moving in a few microns, and all of a sudden, it goes through some amplifiers literally at the speed-of-light minus velocity factor going through a transmitter and you've got this 50,000 watts of this little needle wiggling there. Especially if it was at night time, they could hear the wiggles of this little needle 1500 miles or more away. To me, to this day, that is absolutely fascinating to do.

That's the on-air stuff, yeah, and I've just always enjoyed performing on the air. I was invited to work at the first 50-kilowatt AM station. I was twenty-two years old. They said, "We like the way you sound." I was doing three jobs at the time. I was doing Top Forty on a suburban station, I was doing middle of the road on a downtown Cleveland station, and I was also doing the announcing for one of the TV stations here. This was when I was like twenty-three years old. I just never lost the fascination with being on either side of the microphone.

Chris: Wow.

Kirk: Hey, Our show is This Week in Radio Tech. We are talking to Ted Alexander. Ted is a support engineer at the Telos Alliance, and he is retiring pretty soon. You may have seen an ad if you watch Facebook or Twitter or pay attention to anything that the Telos Alliance does and they are hiring. So, if you are qualified and are interested...

Ted: You want my job?

Kirk: ...you might get Ted's job. Hard shoes to fill, though. I'll tell you that right now. Hey, Christ Tobin is with us. Chris, Ted mentioned-who was it who went on to Ten-Ten Wins?

Ted: Several of the guys from Cleveland that we mentioned. Pete Myers, who was "Mad Daddy", and he went on to Ten-Ten Wins, and I think Johnny Holiday was up there, too, back in the early sixties.

Chris: Johnny Holiday was at ABC.

Ted: Okay, well, one of the stations up there, and it was just-I could not get Ten-Ten Wins in Cleveland very often, because the way that their pattern worked, because we got CFRB in Toronto on the same frequency. He was one of the guys that I wanted to be like.

Kirk: Wow. So, as I said, we are talking to Ted Alexander, and we are going to get into talking to Ted about the art of troubleshooting, and we are going to wrap it up with talking about, "Hey, when you call support, how should you prepare yourself so you can get the best results out of folks in support?" Ted, you have this fascination with electronics, tubes, and radio. Did you get some education in electronics? How did you move on to being able to...

Ted: I did it all on my own, really, just going to the library, reading every book I could find, and getting into HAM radio was a tremendous part of it, because I kind of figured out what tubes did, amplifiers, receivers, and all. Now, let's make a transmitter. You've got to start off with an oscillator. How do you make it work? Well, you develop certain kinds of feedback circuits. Then, when you get into the HAM radio, and the commercial licenses, what's a Kolpitz oscillator? What's a Hartley oscillator?

What's a Tuned Plate Tuned Grid? All of those different kinds of oscillators-these are all tube days I'm talking about now.

In fact, it was interesting, because back about 1961, I got a little transistor-and I still remember the number 2N1266-that would oscillate at the unheard of frequency of seven megahertz in the HAM radio forty meter band. I built a little transmitter, put it on my bicycle, and drove around with it. It got a range of about one or two miles, but it was just the fascination of saying, "Okay, well, I can do 100 milliwatts. Now, can I do one watt? Can I do five watts or ten watts? I built a transmitter using one of several tubes-the 6V6 and the 6L6 category-a crystal control, and managed to light a light bulb with it.

I got into HAM radio in 1960. I had a Heath Kit DX20, which gave about fifty watts of output. You learn how to make these things work, like what does grid drive do? What is plate current? What is dipping a plate? Class A, B, and C amplifiers at the time? How do you modulate it? Can you modulate the plate, the grid, the cathode? Yes, all those. I built a suppressor grid modulator for these transmitters, and that led on and on and on. Finally, I got up to the several-hundred watt category of HAM transmitters, and that was pretty much it for that part of my life, but that was about the time I got the first phone.

That got me in the door of a radio station, and it took a trial by fire, even though it was only a 500=watt radio station, and a one degree and one percent tolerance antenna system. Those of you in the business know what that's all about. The measurement instruments were only good to two percent, so you had to keep your two percent instruments within one percent of what your license said.

That got me started. That got me hired as an engineer, so one day the guy that used to read horse race results, he had a racing machine in the studio there. You ever see a Marx brother's movie with the racing machine that gets these results? Well, we had one of those.

Kirk: Yeah.

Ted: The guy was making book on that machine, and they fired him. They said, "Who is going to read the results?" "I'll do it! I'll do it!," I said. I remember going in there, and after I read the results, I think the program director expected somebody to come out and say, [inaudible 00:18:59] the fourth race it sits on the...." He had this look of amazement on his face saying, "You were terrific!" From that point onward, I just kept on talking my way into it as much as I could on the air, at the same time keeping this directional AM radio station on the air, was invited to work at a couple of other places, because they liked the way I sound. Then, I just kept on proceeding through the career.

Chris: Wow.

Kirk: Wow. I don't know how people learn this kind of stuff today. What you described, reading books, not too different from what I did. I read every manual that I could get ahold of, and so many broadcast equipment manuals had a theory of operations section, and they would tell you how-almost part-by-part-how the thing worked. I got to it, "Okay, this transistor turns on, and it turns this bigger transistor on, and that pulls a current through the solenoid, which pulls the controller up and the cart plays.

Ted: We can tell how recent you are, because you are talking about transistors and I was talking about tubes, but don't underestimate the fact that in HAM radio, you can legally build your own transmitters. You don't have to have a type accepted or a type approved. You can build your own, and the learning process on that is just irreplaceable.

Then, I went on to audio. We were talking about how fascinated I was about audio processing. I learned-somebody gave me the schematic and the theory of operation of an old Gates State Level, which was from the late fifties, early sixties. You get the audio to control a negative bias: the higher the audio is, the higher the bias is, so you'll be able to use this as a gain stage to compress the audio, depending on-you learn time constants and compression ratios and stuff.

I built an amplifier with a control input to the suppressor grid as well on that, with a side chain. I figured, well, if I had a side chain and rectified it, if I had a side chain that I could control the amount of audio that I'm feeding back into as DC control voltage, I can vary the characteristics of this device. So, that was one of the first audio AGCs that I had built. Then, I found that there was a four-diode-what was it? You used four diodes that you biased that would also act as a variable-gain element. Then, you got into the photo cells as variable gain elements.

That was the beginning of my experimentation with how you control audio. Clipping: that was another thing. This has all progressed into what we are now doing at Telos, into this highly-sophisticated, digital way of controlling audio. In fact, Frank Foti grew up listening to me, and he wound up working at the very first radio that he worked at was the one that I worked at at one time.

Kirk: Wow, wow.

Ted: Frank and I go way back.

Kirk: I can tell. Let's chat a little bit about troubleshooting, because that's what you help people do, or people ask you to do it: "Hey, my widget isn't working. What's wrong with it?" You have to troubleshoot it by asking them the right questions. Do you have an overriding theory or theorem-you know, Alexander's Law-on troubleshooting?

Ted: I guess you could say, "Before you call for troubleshooting, have at least some kind of working idea of what happens behind the front panel of that equipment." I mean, I will get a call from someone saying they don't even know how to pronounce the Telos name. They'll call it a "Tea-loss Zef-fire" or a "Zeffler" or something like that. Here's what you need to do first of all, if you have no experience going behind the panel, looking at actually what's happening with the equipment and have a little bit of an idea of everything from a gain stage to an oscillator to a control circuit.

Heck, GPIO is foreign language to a lot of people. Don't expect us to be able to help you with troubleshooting if-you know, it's like, "Go in your car, insert the key into the ignition switch, and turn it." "Well, what's an ignition switch?" The same thing applies to the electronics and the troubleshooting we are trying to do. Depending on who you are talking to-if it's an owner or manager that might not be technical-who up front says, "I'm not technical," then you usually say, "Well, we want to send it in." We give you a few checks: "Is everything plugged in alright? Are you seeing movement on the meters? Do you smell smoke?"

You literally have to get to the point where they have to either say, "Yes, I want to continue the troubleshooting," or, "No, I'm just not capable of it, and we are just going to send it in." If we get to the point where, "Yeah, I want to go behind the panel," okay, first thing to do: what's common to every circuit in there? The power supply. Measure the power supply. I will get questions, "Well, how do you do that?" Well, you've got meters. Can you check ripple on an AC supply? Voltages and stuff? You explain that to them. You could say, "You can use a DC coupled scope. You could use a meter - a multi-meter.

There's different digital and analog-type meters you could use." The power supplies, alright... If it gets into the more complicated things, "Is this LED lit? Do any of the chips feel hot? Do you see anything burned? Are you getting any audio meter movement at all? Are you sure you have all of the inputs and outputs plugged into the right place? Can you actually verify that whatever is coming from that input or going to the output is actually coming from and getting to [inaudible 00:24:42] to your board. Maybe somebody stepped on the wire and broke that." You've got to, like when you go to a doctor, "Doc, it hurts here. It doesn't hurt somewhere above my feet," and then tell me where it is. No, "It hurts here. My ear hurts," or something or other.

This is what you need to do with the equipment. It won't dial if it's a hybrid. If it's an ISDN unit, I don't get a Ready Ready indication. If it's a network indication, "Is your NIC, are you seeing any data on there? Is it plugged in?" If it's audio, "Do you have any test equipment?", and a lot of people don't even have the most basic of test equipment. You've got to say, "Well, here, when you plug it into the console, do you hear hum, do you hear hiss?" We'll get calls where they will get an AES piece of equipment that they don't know what AES is. They'll plug it in and say, "All I'm hearing is a hiss." They will plug an ISDN line into a phone, "All I'm hearing is a faint tick. There is something wrong here."

You've got to try to pull that information from the person. You've got to glean as much as you can-not quite apologizing, but saying, "Look, I've got to ask this: do you know if you've paid your phone bill?" Something as simple as that, that's really the start of troubleshooting. Then, you get to the point where you really can't do component-level troubleshooting over the phone. You can't have someone, "Well, can I buy a replacement part?" "Do you have Service-Mount Technology workstations?" "No." "Well, then, you are not going to be able to make it work."

I had a guy call me up a couple of years ago, and he had one of these crying-type voices, "I don't think I can make this work. I think I broke it." "Well, what'd you do?" "I tried to replace a resistor on a 2X12 surface mount board"-that's a six layer board-"with my soldering gun." Ten seconds with a soldering gun and he just cost himself $1,300, because he ruined the motherboard. It's stuff like that. You have to try to hope that people don't get far enough into it to either ruin the equipment or kill themselves.

Kirk: You mentioned something, Ted, there, that slips my mind until somebody mentions it. Modern equipment has multi, multi-layered circuit boards. This is not just reserved for PC motherboards, but broadcast gear from almost any manufacturer is going to be way more than just a layer of Bakelite and copper on the top and bottom. You have layer after layer in these things now.

Ted: Yes. It's not a Heathkit, it's not through the hole and solder and cut off the wire lees. These things are all machine assembled, and unless you literally have a surface mount test station and the ability to work on it, it's almost impossible to fix.

You can go in there with a signal tracer-and people ask what that is. You go in there with a signal tracer and try to follow the audio through. "How do I tell if the logic is working?" "Do you have a logic probe?" "No." "Well, then you can't do it." You don't want people sticking their fingers into something that they don't know, anyway, or they can ruin something. You have to assess, and this is by the questions that we were talking about here, just how deep these guys or gals want to get into the equipment before saying, "Okay, we're going to send it in."

You make them feel good. You say, "How deep do you want to go? Where's your level of expertise?" and they usually are the ones that are saying, "That's it, I don't know any more." Try to get a description of a problem. "Well, it's making a hiss sound, but it sounds more like a hum, and then once in a while, it's a pop." One of the great things you could do is, if you've got an audio problem on anything, whether it be a hybrid, an ISDN box, an audio processor, capture an audio file. Send it to us on a fairly high bitrate MP3, so that we can hear what's going on.

Are you hearing echo and-or distortion? A lot of echo these days is coming from the phone lines, the cellphones. Look at all the latency and echo and all the odd little artifacts you get from a cellphone. Have you guys ever heard of a comfort tone? How many people have never heard of a comfort tone? A comfort tone is what you apply to a consumer-type cellphone, because most of the time, digital is fairly quiet. It's either there or it's not. People were wondering whether they were even connected, because when they got used to the analog phones, the noise would build up and then it would finally quit, just like an FM station.

Well, the telephone companies actually insert a little bit of pink noise or white noise, to be able to assure the customer that, as they talk, they hear this hiss, and that they are connected. Well, we just got a call today, a gentleman saying he's hearing a hiss on his telephone. Well, it's not there all the time, it's only on certain calls. That had to be what it was, this so-called comfort tone.

All these odd little things that most people will complain about and blame the equipment on, but it's really their bill dollars at work with their telephone companies. The changeover from circuit switched to packet switched, from the old relays to electronic phones, that's a lot of territory to cover for a lot of the younger engineers, especially.

Kirk: Folks, you are listening or watching to This Week in Radio Tech. I'm Kirk Harnack, your host, along with Chris Tobin, in New York, and Ted Alexander is our guest. When we come back after this next little announcement, I want to talk to Ted about the question that comes to me a lot, is how do you help an end user determine if the problem is in the box they're calling about, or if it's external to that box? I troubleshot something today, over the phone with a gentleman, and the trouble was actually external. It wasn't the box at all. I'd like to get Ted's thoughts about that.

Our show is brought to you in part by the folks at Telos and a wonderful product called the Telos ProSTREAM. ProSTREAM is a new mark of the Telos Alliance, and it has to do with audio processing and streaming audio and coding.

That's what I was talking about, the ProSTREAM 9X/2 and the ProSTREAM X2. These are two pieces of software, available from the Telos Alliance. The 9X/2 is really cool. It's got [inaudible 0:32:43.5] Omnia 9 processing built into it, and the regular ProSTREAM X2 has the famous Omnia AX three-band processing built into it. Either one of them will make your audio stream sound really good, really clean. I'm using it in all my radio stations, and I think you should check it out, too.

Hey, streaming is becoming really popular, as you know. We knew it would, and it seems like we're crossing that threshold where it's really important now, for broadcasters, and other webcasters, to have a good sounding stream. Thanks to ProSTREAM for sponsoring this part of This Week in Radio Tech. All right, Chris Tobin, are you still with us in Manhattan?

Chris: Yes, I am.

Kirk: Alright. Hey, your video's looking good, too.

Chris: I haven't changed anything, so I don't know.

Kirk: Maybe things are thawing out there. Well, I'll tell you what. I'm going to ask Ted, but let me ask you first, since you're more available now. How does an engineer like you quickly determine is my problem in this piece of equipment that I think it is, or is it external? Is it the wiring, is it the next piece of gear that it's hooked to? What are some quick tests that you can think of, to figure that out?

Chris: Well, in the past, what I usually do is I make sure I have some test gear that I can check easily. As Ted mentioned earlier, you have AES and you have analog audio. For an example, I did have recently, working with the folks at a radio station, they had an issue just like that, a piece of equipment appeared to be dead. The lights came on, but nothing was coming in or out, or at least it appeared that way.

I quickly took out a Q box, which is a powered speaker and test box, from Whirlwind, and it was an analog IO, so there was no AES in this one. I just unplugged the XLR that was feeding the device, plugged that into the Q box, and listened for audio. It turns out no audio was coming out of the cable, so we stopped troubleshooting the box and started going up the chain.

That's one method. You can also have a Foscam AES powered speaker, and do the same thing. That's what I used to do, when I worked at a facility here in Manhattan. I had a little go cart, a trouble cart, and it was all the various little boxes and gadgets that could be used to simulate the device on the test, and find out whether the IO was the issue or the box itself. That's the best way to do it.

Otherwise, as Ted pointed out, you take a bud set or a telephone set and plug it across the wires and you hear clicking, going, "I don't know what this means." At least with something with a speaker on it, or a meter device that's very straightforward, you can get a real idea of what's going on.

Kirk: Good idea. Ted, how about you? How do you help people determine is the problem my Telos box, or is it something else?

Ted: First of all, you have to establish the level of expertise to the person in which you're talking. If you're talking to someone who is an engineer, and especially if you talk to before-you could talk engineeringese and they'll get it, and usually what it is, "Does your equipment exhibit this type of artifact?"

Usually, when you talk to an engineer who's familiar with what's going on behind the panel, an experienced engineer, you don't really have too much of a problem discussing some of the basic troubleshooting, because then you're just talking about the nuances of the equipment. Where the problem comes in is are the people who are not as technically adept, learned, or not adept at all, and they're trying to say, "Well, why doesn't my hybrid work?"

Well, you teach them, "Let's see if we can determine about where the point of failure is." If it's on a hybrid, if you plug in a punch line to a regular telephone, does it work? If you plug in an audio source, like from your mix minus, from your board, to feed a hybrid, are you really getting audio there? Is it truly a mixed minus, or are you feeding back audio from another part of the board? That's a lot of questions we get. Mixed minus seems to be kind of mysterious to a lot of the younger people, younger and-or inexperienced people.

If you feed, say, an audio generator a tone into your hybrid, is that clean? Well, they don't have test equipment. Most of these people don't have test equipment. Okay, let's take maybe the output of a mic pre-amp that's working into your board, unplug it from the board, plug it into the back of the line input of your hybrid. Are you getting clean audio that way? This is how you're determining where along the chain that your audio's failing. If you're getting an output problem-a lot of problems with the direct coupled outputs that we use in a lot of our Telos equipment, it's direct coupled because that's the best. You don't have to go through transformers or blocking capacitors or anything, which can deteriorate the audio.

But the problem with that is, if you use some of these small mixers, like a Behringer or a Mackie, you have a universal input on the front that you can set anywhere from zero to maybe a +8 to a -60 input level, and you turn on the fan and power, you almost instantly destroy the output device or devices on these equipment that you're feeding it with, because you're putting 48 volts across a 12 volt device. There it goes, it's gone. That's something that you have to be careful of.

How do you determine that? Well, on some of the earlier Telos equipment, you could reach in and there's a particular chip that would go bad, and it would get very hot when it was turned on. Okay, that's the chip, so you just saved yourself a couple hundred dollars in shipping and repair costs, by just replacing it with a ten dollar chip.

Most of the people could understand that, and at least some of the people that had done a little bit of installation of boards and cards in computers. If it's a-let's say an ISDN. How do I know if this inactive means my ISDN card is working or not? Well, first of all, does the box recognize ISDN? If it does, then you'll be able to dial it up on your front panel menu, and there's specific things in this effort you can do about this. We won't get into the details on that, but you can tell whether it's working or not. Now, is the light on the back on or off? Is it flashing? Is it steady? When you plug in the ISDN line, does anything happen with the menus, when you plug it in, as the device recognizes the ISDN line?

Why does an ISDN-why can't you just plug a pots line in there, and you get into the description of, well, most people understand ISDN is digital, pots is analog. "Oh, I understand." They don't, but they accept that as an explanation. You just try to get them to plug and unplug audio, phone lines, try a remote control, if they've got any GPIO stuff coming, or external connections as they would. What happens if you try to, say, just connect Pin 1 to Pin 14 or something? Do you get a connection there? It's just seeing whether or not, like you were saying earlier here, Kirk, about if the equipment itself is failed or if the peripherals to it have failed.

As we get into the networking things, this is a whole new thing for-heck, it was new to me, too, and I'm not the greatest expert at that level, but you've got to talk-if you don't have someone there who is at least conversant in mid-range levels of how to set up a network, you could go round and round in circles with the customer, and they will not understand, "Well, are you getting an address conflict?" "I don't know." "Are you able to ping it?" "I don't know." Some of our equipment, you turn the ping off. Some routers don't let pings through. "Well, I try to ping it and I don't see it." "Well, what's your router?" "I don't know, what's a router?"

That is a whole new level that's really in the past five years, especially, surfacing, as more and more equipment is networked in operation. [inaudible 00:40:38], the audio over IP, the live wire things, if your network is not passing that data along and not modifying those packets right, or they're getting lost somewhere or you're getting traffic jams or conflicts, it's not just finding what happened if you're getting a little hum on a piece of wire. It's your whole network could go down, and stuff could reflect back into it as well. That's why the guys that are the [inaudible 00:41:05] experts, really, that's where they really are in their stuff, because they've seen this before, the experience of talking with customers that have had some of these conflicts.

"Oh yeah, we had that happen back in KXL. Here's what you do." "What's your router set like? Did you go out and buy some kind of a Radio Shack router? That's not going to work. Is there too much traffic flowing around along your network? Is there something coming out and flooding your network? Why every 60 seconds do you get a pop, and it's very rhythmic?" All kinds of things like that, that most program directors, most owners, most general managers don't understand. Well, we know it's not the equipment, so it's got to be your network. "Well, tell us what to do." "We've got to be on site to do that." "Can't you dial in and do it remotely?" "Not necessarily."

This is one of the things that, as we go along and as radio station staffs are shrinking, we've got to communicate enough to the customer, saying you can only do so much on your own, unless you have an expert on the staff there, that can help you out.

Kirk: Boy, that's the truth. It's sad. I don't know-well, I don't know how you can have a business operate that depends on technical gear and not have a relationship with a technical person who can help you fix that.

Chris: It's easy.

Kirk: What was that, Chris?

Chris: It's easy. There are a lot of places now, that defer technical assistance, because of the do it yourself thinking that's now available with technologies at home.

Ted: But we're talking also about the mom and pop stations who are just putting in their first digital console, who don't know what-this is where we get most of the calls, from the people who are just inexperienced in this. They don't want to learn, or they're the people that are those that think they know it all, and you say something, "Oh, you mean this?" "No, I'm not meaning that."

Please just listen to us and follow along with what we're trying to guide you to, because it may sound elementary to you, but we're setting up our basis of what we're helping you troubleshoot. And it looks like we can narrow this down to a certain place in your system, whether it's internal to your network, internal to your audio wiring, whether it's all analog or all live wire or a combination of it all. We've just got to be able to get the information from you. It may sound elementary. Give us the information. We're on a fact finding tour, just as you would when you go into the hospital and you've got something hurting.

Kirk: How often do you find, Ted, that people call you, wanting a quick answer, like, "Oh, I know they've seen this before. They can tell me exactly what to do," when in fact it isn't a quick answer? We still have to determine what the problem is. That's my own problem, when I call a tech support at some company. I'm figuring, look, if I'm having this problem, surely other people have, too. But we still have a lot to go through to get to an answer. What do you think about that, a quick answer?

Ted: It's going to depend on the person that calls you. If that person is an expert and they say, "I've already done this, this, this, and this, then you can talk about certain things that happened that are peculiar to the equipment that you're using. But if it's a general type question, you've got to start building that base up, of what they're talking about, so that you can say, "Okay, is it the line? Is it the wiring? Is it the equipment? Do you even have it plugged in? Has it done this for a while, or did it just start?"

A lot of times, the people just don't know. That's where the time involved comes in. Some people want you to troubleshoot with them. They'll say, "Okay, did you have the lid off of it?" "Just a minute, I'll take it off." They set the phone down, and then about three or four minutes of clanking and banking, they'll come up and back and say, "Okay, now what?"

"Okay, measure the power supply." "Okay," a bunch of clanging and banging and then five minutes go by, "Oh, I just found my meter." This is the stuff that the customers need to have handy. If they're going to attempt to troubleshoot, have the lid off the device, have the meter handy, have the pieces of testing equipment there, and if you don't have them, the great amount of-even if we spend a great amount of time talking with you on this, and you can't help yourself by us helping you, how are we going to say that? We're not going to be able to help you very much until you send it in and we put it on the test patch.

Kirk: We're going to move into the question where-I hope people watching are listening to this program can take something away from it, and that is what are the best things that a customer can do to be ready to give you the information, so you can help them back?

By the way, this won't close out the show. Ted, before we get out of here, at the very end of the show, I'd like to see if we can get one little war story out of you, something really fun or something we could learn about, from the end. But for now, let's go with that, "Okay, I'm going to call up Telos and see if they can help me solve this problem with my phone hybrid." How do I need to be prepared to call you?

Ted: First of all, know what piece of equipment you're talking about. If it says Telos on it, we make dozens of products. Know what it is. If you're calling about a console, what kind of console is it? If you're calling about a hybrid, what does it say on the front? If you're calling about an ISDN unit, what does it say on the front? Let us at least know the piece of equipment you're talking to, number one.

Number two, if you really want to troubleshoot it yourself, have some test equipment there. Have at least-and as Chris was saying earlier-a bud set or an amplifier, like an amplified speaker of some sort, and a signal source. You can get these little things, the little devices inside the XLR connectors that'll inject a signal.

You've got a little amplifier to be able to hear what's coming out of it. For telephone equipment, the less now than there was before, but you really need a bud set. That's just a telephone test set with clip leans on it, that you can listen for. That's valuable, too, when you want to listen to, say, are you actually sending audio down the line, that the caller can't hear? Is the meter reading on the device actually corresponding to the audio that's going down the line? Have that ready.

One of the things that we also get, too, is that somebody will call for tech support, and if we're on another call, we'll say, "Okay, we'll return your call, and we at Telos try to get the call within the next half hour to an hour." We'll call back ten minutes later and leave a voicemail, because somebody will call up and say, "I need tech support," but when you call them back, they're not there, and you play phone tag for a while.

"Well, I've been trying to get ahold of you." Here it is. Consider, put yourself on the end of the line. Do you want tech support and you want it clear, concise and quick? You've got to be responsible for knowing what the equipment is, knowing how far you want to go on your own troubleshooting. Do you want to send it in, or do you actually want the advice on what to do?

Then we'll conclude the phone call, you take it back to the bench and you do the tests through it, and then let us know, or we can either do it as a step-by-step procedure. But that's it. Know what you're calling about and be ready for a return call, before you even place that initial call. I know there's panic situations. You're off the air. We understand that. This is one of the things that we do, but as much as you can control, take control.

Kirk: I want to hear Chris Tobin's thoughts about this. In doing my own troubleshooting, it's always seemed to me that one of the most important things I can understand or know is what does this piece of gear look like, when it's operating correctly? Well, what does correct operation look like? If I don't know that, then I'm going to have a hard time figuring out what may be wrong with it, even to tell somebody else. Chris, am I off base there, or is that a good plan?

Chris: That's a good plan. Recently, I had a call from an operation that's a small group of folks, and I won't call them mom and pop, but along those lines. They had just built this studio, a very nice little setup, all analog, and they had some questions about a couple of codecs that they had, and they said, "We're not sure if this is right or wrong." I said, "Well, when you installed the equipment, do you recall making any notes? Did you write anything down, because maybe you were afraid that if you came back at late night, you wouldn't know how to re-dial the connection?"

As a matter of fact, they did. I would suggest-and I've always suggested this-when you're installing equipment, whether it's brand new, a replacement, or an upgrade, make notes when you've got the unit working the way it's supposed to, just like Kirk pointed out.

Normal operating condition, the lights are green, the meters are moving, and the front panel flashes blue, then make a note of it and say, "This is normal." Then this way, when you're looking at your box and going, "Well, it's flashing red and yellow and there's something that's waving its hand it me, that's definitely not normal," so at least you know right away it's not a normal state.

I always try to log meaning right in the book, a binder. Just set aside a book. Do not use a book that you use for everything else every day. Just take a book, one of those marble composition books. Some people might remember those, and you just make notes. Studio 2, Studio A or Air Studio, here's the stuff in there, and that's a good start, phone numbers, ISDNs, if it's a T1, T1 circuit IDs, if it's IP, IP addresses, gateways, the whole bit, things of that sort.

But something I wanted to point out, when Ted was talking about troubleshooting, and I had mentioned earlier I have in front of here-let's see if I can do this-people that use chrome blocks. You know how chrome blocks can be used to interrupt the circuit? They're actually little patch [inaudible 00:50:34]? This is something I made a long time ago, and a radio station I worked at, we had several radio lines, dedicated loops of pulse comms, the digital 15k circuits, to our transmitter sites, as backups.

One night, during maintenance, we switched to the backup line and discovered that our left and rights were out of phase. A great stereo image, but nobody could hear us on a mono radio. I will say, it was an interesting effect. Immediately, I grabbed my little test jig, and here, you see it's got a chrome. It has an XLR on it, and binding post connectors.

I interrupt the circuit, and I can flip the polarity and guess what? I was able to determine which of the two lines was in trouble. That's one way. This is a standard chrome adapter you can get, at Telecom World. It's got alligator clips on it. That's a standard telecom unit. Then there's my special one, which is designed with an XLR connector on the end. You patch into the circuit, and depending on if it's a send or receive, it determines the XLR that you use.

Again, you can quickly troubleshoot what's going on and interrupt the circuit. This one lets you interrupt the circuit, but keep it going if you use the banana plugs properly. As we mentioned earlier, bud sets, Q boxes, powered speakers, there's all kinds of things you can choose. I just totally forgot about these, and I haven't used them in a while, but they do come in handy.

These are the kinds of things for those who are well versed in the technologies and want to do something about it, about maintaining the facility. You should practice doing a little kit, have a little bag for it and do it that way. If you're a person watching and listening to this program and you're not technically inclined, as Ted pointed out, find somebody who would be, and they can help you, assist you with that phone call to customer support to your favorite manufacturer, whether it be Telos or someone else.

Kirk: We're going to hear from Ted here in a second. One of my favorite documentation tools is this right here, a camera. Once it's working right, once it's wired right, once I've got the connectors hooked up to the back of the transmitter-I installed an Alltel to an F kilowatt FM transmitter. Man, when I was done with the remote control and the remote reading block, I took a picture of that sucker with this.

Chris: What have you done with that video file?

Kirk: Well, hey, here's the pro tip of the night. Now, I happen to be an Android phone user, and I'm hooked up to a Gmail account, and I guess a Google+ account. Every photo I take goes up to the cloud, and it's certainly searchable by date. If you go online to your photos section of your Google+ account, you can really quickly scroll through. I've got like 64,000 pictures stored up there, and as long as I know about when it was taken, I can find it. If I were to go tag it, of course, if you tag it with a couple of keywords, WKXY remote control, bam, you can find it anytime. I don't know, that works for me. Maybe it'll work for you, too.

Ted: I was just going to say something about that, too, as well, Kirk. Before you mentioned it, I said cameras are going to be ubiquitous. If you have a cellphone, you've probably got a camera. Not only do you take a picture of what you're doing, and as Chris was saying, if you've got this equipment, you know what it's supposed to look like. Take a picture of it and let it run for fifteen or twenty seconds. What does your processing meter look like? What does your ISDN line look like? What does the front of your Zip 1 look like, with your connections, number one?

Number two, if you are troubleshooting and you want to get into the equipment, this is something that has saved a number of people. They've said, "I'm glad you thought of that." If you disassemble, say, a front panel or something, every stage, take a picture of it. That way, when you're all done with it, when you put it back together, you'll know where that-you won't have any leftover parts.

Kirk: Exactly. Hey, we've got to jump back to Ted in a second, but we've got to get our third sponsor in line here. We've got to pay the bills. I want to mention that our show is also brought to you in part by the folks at Lawo, and Lawo is a console company. They make these big, beautiful consoles for remote trucks and TV stations, but they've got a new console.

Here it is, right here. Here's the video that was shot at least year's NAB show. It is-this is Mike Dosh, and he is showing you the interface to the Lawo CrystalClear audio console. Now, CrystalClear is a two-part console. It's got the touch screen interface, and it's a multi-touch interface. There's part of the customization, right there.

You can watch this video for yourself online, if you go to the Lawo website. It's two parts, the multi-touch touch screen interface. That's the standard PC. Well, it's a nice PC. It's an HP with this multi-touch touch screen. It feels really good, works well, very, very responsive, and it runs an app that looks, as you can see, just like a console.

Then, the DSP engine, that sits back in the rack, wherever you need it to, wherever your audio inputs and outputs are. You can plug in microphones, analog inputs, AES inputs. You've got AES and analog outputs as well, plus you can hook it up to AOIP. It's got an Ethernet jack. It's compatible with both Ravenna and AES 67, since AES 67 is now a subset of Ravenna. It does all the really cool things that you would expect a console to do, like have presets that you can bring back up.

If you need to change a show and change which sources are hooked to which faders, you can easily do that. It has a very accurate time clock. You could, of course, connect it to an NTP time source and that is perfectly accurate. It has program one, program two, and preview, so it's got all those cool things. It does automatic mix and minus. You'd expect that from a modern day digital console. It's got talk back to guests and to remote sites, just an amazing console. Usually we show the still pictures of it, but I thought we'd show you this video.

It's about a ten-minute video. If you want to go to the Lawo website, L-A-W-O-it's a German name, it's pronounced Lavo, but it's L-A-W-O, and go to their website, look for the CrystalClear console. Ah, there's the compression and the limiting that's available on each one. Find that video. It's on the product page for the Crystal Clear console. It's about ten minutes long. You can watch the whole thing, and really get a good overview of how that console works and what its benefits and advantages are.

I really want to thank Lawo for sponsoring This Week in Radio Tech, and I sure appreciate their participation. Check them out, if you would. If that kind of console interests you, Lawo.com, L-A-W-O.com.

All right, we're almost out of time. I'm sorry if I cut somebody off. Ted, have you got a little story for us? Maybe you can-we can get a chuckle out of?

Ted: Yes, we were talking earlier about how the reconnecting various remote broadcasts to get your signal back to your studios. We had an interesting one. A guy had an interesting one within the last year or so. A gentleman called up, he had our Zephyr IP Air Zip 1, and said, "It works fine, but when it gets crowded around here, it gets real intermittent." I'm thinking, "Well, first thought is are you using live wire? Are you using WiFi? If you're using a WiFi connection, are you running into a bandwidth trouble? Are you getting throttled out?" "No, no, no, this is a direct connection. They gave us a connection back to their router." What's going on with the router? Is it maybe you're running out of traffic? Because when a lot of people are there - "No, no."

We went around and around and around. Well, it turned out to be somebody had taken it-it was either CAT5 or CAT6. There was a kink in the wire, and it was just making and breaking, and there were more people around, walking on the wire. It would get intermittent. That was just one of those things, like it's the head slapper. "Why didn't I think of this?" That was just one of the fairly recent ones. There's a lot of stories out there.

Kirk: Oh man. Oh, wow. I guess all our lives, we'll come across stuff like that, things that you just wouldn't expect.

Ted: Yes, after you do this-I've been doing this for-I've been on this earth for over two-thirds of a century, and two-thirds of my life, for about 52 years now, I've been getting paid to do this. I've been hanging around it since I was in early grade school. Everything, every picture tells a story, like the old Rod Stewart thing.

Almost every customer call that we get is a separate story, from the guys that can't figure out how to hook stuff up to odd little things that happen that you would never-"Have you ever heard of this before?" "No," but then you start troubleshooting, as we were talking earlier in the broadcast here, as to how to try to track down where the point of failure is. That's the thing. We need to find the point of failure when you're calling up for tech support, because you usually don't call up for tech support for failures, or for non-failures.

Tech support we get for non-failures are like, "How do you adjust an audio processor?" That has its own set of interesting things. "How do you season your stew?" Everybody likes it a little bit different. You try to narrow down what the customer wants. "Okay, do you want more highs? Do you want more clipping? Do you want more open?" You can guide them as to what controls. "Oh yeah, that does that. Good, I'm good."

That is an education process. That's really fun to do, because when you have the lights come on an the customer's reaction, it's like-the other thing we do, one of the other things we do at tech support is I don't know how to set up this mixer I got. I will go online at my desk, and I will call up on the internet, and I'll look at the connections and say, "Here's where your sends are for your mix minus. Here's how to set this up. Don't plug it in here, you'll burn up your input chip," and all that. That's what everyone at the Telos tech support does. We don't just stop at Telos equipment.

Kirk: That'[s a great idea, and that's really above and beyond. Chris Tobin, did you have something you wanted to inject?

Chris: No, no, I was just agreeing with you. That's all. The point I was making with the camera, when you said the camera and taking pictures, what became of the file, I just wanted to make sure you said that it was going somewhere, because I had an incident about a month ago, where I was strapped to a towel leg, working on an antenna, and I had worked with a guy-I said, "You took pictures of this problem, right?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah," that kind of thing. "Okay, let's see the pictures. Where'd you put them? Are they up top or are they on a file server? Where are they?" "They're right here, on my phone."

He takes the phone out of his pocket, it drops to the ground, and stops working. I'm standing there, at 2:00 in the morning, going, "Okay, I guess we're going to start troubleshooting all over again, and figure out which of the five antennas that transmit to the TV station-four antennas-TV station that phase together. I'm sitting there, going, "Wow, this is going to be fun, tearing apart the weatherproofing on these DIN connectors, 78 connectors."

Yes, that's why I just want to point out the phone is absolutely ubiquitous, and it's definitely the way to go with the camera, as Ted pointed out, as you pointed out. But I have run into several occasions where people don't transfer the information to some other place, so that it's readily available, or at least protected.

Kirk: Back up your data. If Apple didn't offer iCloud, and if Android didn't offer their whatever they call it, to get up to your Google+, I wouldn't back it up, either. I would assume I was safe enough, until I needed them, needed the pictures. Thank goodness that that stuff happens automatically, 65,000 pictures later.

Ted: On my computer, which is right in front of me here, I've got three hard drives. Two of them are backing up everything, plus I've got an external hard drive with a docking station, because there's certain stuff I just don't want to lose.

Kirk: Yes, I hear you.

Chris: I'm the same.

Kirk: Folks, that's going to do it for us. We've gone a little bit over an hour, and enjoyed talking with Ted Alexander. He's a tech support engineer at the Telos Alliance, and just a few months away from retiring. Ted, is there a date?

Ted: I was just about to say that. Yes, Kurt. I was just about to say, anybody there want my job, it's open, but not because they're firing me. It's because Telos has been a fabulous place to work. I've been there for ten years. I regret that-well, I regret having to leave there. I'm looking forward to retirement. You want my job? It's open.

Kirk: Well, applications are being taken at the Telos Alliance, in Cleveland, Ohio. Chris Tobin, thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate you taking an hour and twenty minutes out of your day to join us. Thanks a lot.

Chris: No problem, any time. I had fun. I learn a lot, so I hope everybody else does.

Kirk: Good deal. If folks can find you, if they need help with broadcast engineering, especially in this IP world, where do they find you, Chris?

Chris: Where they've been finding me lately is Support@IPCodex.com. It's real simple to remember. Emails have been coming in lately, so it's good.

Kirk: Good. Support@IPCodex.com, and if you need tech support from Ted Alexander on a Telos, Omni, or Axia product you'd better get your call in soon, because he won't be there much longer. Ted, thanks for being with us, buddy. I appreciate it.

Ted: My pleasure. Thanks, guys.

Kirk: Our show's been brought to you by the folks at Axia, who make the Fusion console, also ProSTREAM, with the ProSTREAM X2 and 9X/2 software that runs on a PC, that does audio processing and stream encoding, and also by the folks at Lawo and their CrystalClear audio console, the touchscreen interface console. Alright, we've got a whole year of great shows coming up, at least eleven more months this year, great shows coming up. Thank you for joining us, and please tell your friends about This Week in Radio Tech, and be sure you watch some of the other cool shows that are on the GFQ Network. I know that I'll appreciate it, and so will Andrew, Sherry, and everybody else at GFQ. We'll see you next week on This Week in Radio Tech. Bye.

Telos Alliance has led the audio industry’s innovation in Broadcast Audio, Digital Mixing & Mastering, Audio Processors & Compression, Broadcast Mixing Consoles, Audio Interfaces, AoIP & VoIP for over three decades. The Telos Alliance family of products include Telos® Systems, Omnia® Audio, Axia® Audio, Linear Acoustic®, 25-Seven® Systems, Minnetonka™ Audio and Jünger Audio. Covering all ranges of Audio Applications for Radio & Television from Telos Infinity IP Intercom Systems, Jünger Audio AIXpressor Audio Processor, Omnia 11 Radio Processors, Axia Networked Quasar Broadcast Mixing Consoles and Linear Acoustic AMS Audio Quality Loudness Monitoring and 25-Seven TVC-15 Watermark Analyzer & Monitor. Telos Alliance offers audio solutions for any and every Radio, Television, Live Events, Podcast & Live Streaming Studio With Telos Alliance “Broadcast Without Limits.”