Studio Tips

Information that doesn’t turn up or seem obvious from other sources

Headphone Mysteries

 Most operators don’t realize that the two monitor strips (where the volume knob for the overhead speakers and the headphones are) are not left and right stereo; they are NOT the headphone knobs for the operator and the co host. The left monitor strip is for MCR and the right monitor strip is for the News Booth. BOTH the headphones in MCR are controlled by the SAME knob. the headphones in the News Booth are controlled by the other headphone knob
(long before I got here they disconnected the speaker in the Booth).

 

The Microphone is Your Friend

There’s good reason not to hold the studio mic while using it. Unlike hand mics that are insulated, our studio mics will hum when touched by a human (or cat). The reason is that we are electrical beings and our soppy wet bodies conduct electricity rather well. When we handle the mic we provide a ‘ground’ - we change the direction of some of the electrical current to go through us and out our feet to the floor (or our butts to the chair, I’m not entirely sure). This is not a quiet event.
You don’t hear the hum so well, but your audience does. It sounds cheap and fuzzy. The solution is not to touch the mic. Place it where it belongs in front of you and let its own arm support it. If it sags while you’re talking, bend to follow it (adjusting it would be noisy with the pot up), or shut it off and fix it. You can bitterly complain to the tech afterward about how loose the arm is.

Monitors & Meters

We broadcast our signal on the FM band at 97.9, and on the internet through a feed that can be accessed off our home page www.unb.ca/CHSR. When we send signal to these places we have to measure the output - remember from your training: high enough to be well heard, not so high you distort.
On the console in master control are five meters. The first two on the left measure the output of Program 1 which is the name for the bus that sends to our FM transmitter. What you see on those meters is what people with radios receive.
The middle meter measures the mono output for any of our busses . . . the default is Program 1.
The last two meters are utility meters and CAN measure any of the outputs, but it is smartest to keep them on the Aux Bus which is the bus we use to send to the internet.
The way you select the meters to measure the internet feed is by pressing the Aux button in the row of buttons called “Utility”. The button is now labelled for your convenience.
If you change the utility meters to measure something else, like the recording bus, please put it back when you are done so that following programmers get a more accurate picture of what they are sending to the internet.

Using Cue as a Talkback System

(communicating off-air between studios)

Did you know that the “Cue” bus on the mics can be used as a talk-back system between the News Booth and MCR?

If you put the MCR mic on Cue and the News Booth mic(s) on cue and change the monitor strips for both MCR and the news Booth to monitor Cue, you can speak back and forth while a song plays without anyone having to leave their seat. You can scare the announcer in the news booth doing this, so be careful unless you can take them in a fight.