STAR Studio Pics

I've just been clearing out the camera memory and noticed some pictures of STAR's studio. May as well share them eh?



[caption id="attachment_101" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="Studio picture."][/caption]

The first picture I have is of the studio as a whole. Yes, we really do have 4 microphones that can go to air. It's rather useful for talk shows and we can swap them out with the union's kit should we need to carry any live music. This combined with our production-type mixer is ideal for live performances. However, we will be keeping this kit available when we replace the mixer with a Sonixer Sovereign (more suited to radio broadcasting) we're in the process of obtaining.
I think we may be kitted out rather well for live performances. It certainly beats any other radio setups I've seen to date.

[caption id="attachment_102" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="Slightly out of date shot of the presenter's view."][/caption]

So a closer look at the presenter mic and playout system. The mics we use are the AT4040s. The sound much better on air than the kit we managed to scrape together from what was in the student's union.
The playout system is our old in-house job (we still have the code for it actually) which has since been replaced by Digiplay. We now operate a 3 screen setup: a touchscreen for Digiplay's audio side (studio_play), a screen for Digiplay's management screen (studio_manage) and the last screen for IRC! The IRC software is actually used to allow the technical team to get in touch with the on-air team.

[caption id="attachment_103" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Some of the rack mounted audio equipment."][/caption]

Being an online radio station means we do not need to do a lot of processing to the audio signal (we don't have the "falling off the air" effect it we're too quiet for example). However, partially down to presenter laziness and a need not to get digital clipping, we do perform some processing.
The compressor on the left is rather heavily abused. We almost try to use it as an AGC unit. Basically, we're trying to make the DJs sound relatively level. It works well enough. There's some variation in DJ voice level (which sounds a little more natural) without expanding the background noise.
The second compressor acts mainly as a limiter, preventing the signal from getting loud enough to cause digital clipping. But of course, it can only work so far....
And finally, on the right is a rather large Firewire sound card. It's where Digiplay's main outputs come from and is only being used as we can't fit enough sound cards in the playout machine.