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The author of this commentary is automotive partnerships director for Radioplayer.

Audi and the VW Group recently renewed their partnership with Radioplayer to continue supporting their brilliant hybrid radio (FM, DAB and IP seamlessly working together with no need for users to choose platforms) and to collaborate on the development of future in-vehicle radio experiences — ensuring Audis, VWs, Porsches and Lamborghinis will all continue to have the best radio experience in their dashboards.

The new deal builds on a successful collaboration that’s been in place since 2017 and lays the foundation for a longer-term relationship. It’s a great example of Radioplayer’s partnership model with the automotive industry — providing a high-value, low-cost partnership direct with broadcasters to develop world class radio experiences in the car.

To do this Radioplayer provides official broadcast metadata direct from thousands of radio stations, technology development support and user-interface design consultation, all free-of-charge wherever possible.

In return, we ask to collaborate on development of the future radio experience. Collaboration with car manufacturers and technology suppliers is essential if radio is to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded dashboard.

We believe that hybrid radio offers the best radio experience today and that’s where our focus is. To ensure continual improvement of radio’s dashboard experience we need constant discussion between car manufacturers and broadcasters to agree and deliver a joint roadmap that keeps pace with both listener expectations and in-car technology. Radio broadcasters must be at the heart of these discussions spanning metadata, technology and the user-interface (UI).

Our official broadcast metadata is of vital importance to a good user experience and as more countries and broadcasters join Radioplayer it will keep on improving. We’ve seen too many instances where unofficial metadata from third parties is either wrong (station logos) or altered (broadcast streams), leading to a poor user experience, so we make it as easy as possible for broadcasters to get their official metadata to us. We’re also proud and active members of WorldDAB and we’re supporting their forthcoming campaign to raise awareness among broadcasters of the importance of making metadata available for car dashboards.

Laurence Harrison

We are technology/platform neutral, and are big supporters of open standards such as RadioDNS and DAB+. We closely monitor technological developments and intervene when we feel radios prime position in the car could be impacted.

One current example is Google’s Android Automotive Operating System, which is starting to grow in importance as it’s adopted by more car manufacturers. We began work in late 2019 on a project to ensure hybrid radio is technologically possible in Android Automotive and the capability is baked into the core source code (known as AOSP) and available to everyone. It’s a complex, emerging area but we’re leading on behalf of our broadcasters and are open to wider collaboration, hopefully including Google, as it could have huge benefits for the radio experience.

We’ve also seen that the standard broadcast radio user interface in Android Automotive is currently poor, a list of FM frequencies, no station names, no station logos, no now-playing information. So at the same time as working on the hybrid capability we’ve also developed a great user interface within Google’s template guidelines which we hope will demonstrate what can be done. Our UI designs are based on the WorldDAB Automotive User Experience Guidelines which we ask all our car manufacturer partners to respect.

In the future there will be other UI design challenges as we merge on-demand and podcast content with live radio and create a personalized experience for listeners. We intend to be at the center of that to help our broadcasters and automotive partners benefit from each other’s expertise. To get it right we’ll need to work together.

As the broadcast and automotive sectors emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic into a difficult economic climate, we believe that deeper collaboration offers a win-win that will undoubtedly improve the radio experience in connected cars. We also want to help ensure radio development projects, particularly on hybrid radio, remain on-track and unaffected.

Of course, we know the pandemic is likely to impact wider automotive trends. Understanding these trends and the implications on longer-term planning for the in-car experience is an important part of how we intend to work to foster collaboration with car manufacturers and keep broadcasters at the heart of radio’s dashboard development.

[Related: “Hybrid Radio Picks Up Momentum”]

The post Broadcasters Must Be at the Heart of Radio’s Dashboard Development appeared first on Radio World.

The author of this commentary is director distribution of the BBC World Service.

Nigel Fry

In response to Frank Karkota’s commentary “No to Digital AM”:

The AM radio band represents a very valuable resource to society and to broadcasters. It offers the opportunity to transmit programs over large areas and well beyond line of sight.

In the present age, digital technologies present a threat and an opportunity for radio broadcasters. Digital technologies generate radio frequency noise that degrades the audio performance of analog AM services (drive past an ATM listening to AM radio and you’ll know what I mean) but also an opportunity to transform the quality of service delivered in the AM band.

Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) supports such a transformation. It not only makes the transmitted signal more resilient but allows much lower power level to be used to cover the same area as an analog service. At the same time it delivers additional information to the listener enhancing the service that can be offered and making services accessible by brand and not just frequency.

Broadcasters can achieve reduced operating costs and deliver higher value services to their audience, which remain free to consume (this is important in many markets where the population cannot afford to access internet services). Commercial receiver solutions are being worked on and being improved all the time. There is an effective aftermarket solution (to retrofit in existing vehicles), and the latest information can be found at drm.org/receivers.

We have recently presented improvements to the open source DREAM software that allow it to work with the readily available Raspberry Pi device. As such it provides an entry-level receiver ideally suited to the hobbyist.

We live in a digital world, and kids today are equipping themselves with the skills and tools needed to live in it and shape it. Broadcasters can take many benefits from that same technology, and we owe it to society to continue to use frequency bands that support audiences remote from or not linked to other forms of connectivity and not allow populations to be constrained by line-of-sight services. DRM digital transmissions in the AM band are the way forward.

[Read more articles and commentaries about digital radio trends and technologies.]

The post BBC’s Fry: Digital in the AM Band Is the Way Forward appeared first on Radio World.

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Commission Upholds Media Bureau's Determination of Expiration of Construction Permit for DWRBD(FM), Horseshoe Beach, FL

Commission Upholds Media Bureau Grant of Modification Application for K227AH, River Pines, CA

Commission denies an Application for Review filed by Michael Karr d/b/a WVUX-LD, Fairmont, West Virginia, seeking a determination that WVUX-LD has must carry rights on satellite television systems

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Commission dismisses Petition for Reconsideration of decision dismissing license renewal application of DWNBN(AM), Meridian, Mississippi

Kudos for the story of pre-vacuum tube transmitters [“When Brute Force Transmitters Ruled the Air,” RWEE, April 22]. In reading this item, there was one statement that has been bugging me: “True to Ohm’s law, when the voltage flowing through an ordinary resistor increases …”

What?

Later in the same paragraph: “increasing voltage results in lowered current flow …” Huh?

I’ll admit that I’ve been out of school for many years; however, I don’t believe the behavior of the elements of Ohm’s Law have changed very much.

Voltage does not “flow,” current does.

Voltage is a difference of potential that causes current to flow.

Did I miss something here?

Author James O’Neal replies to the above letter:

Thanks Clay for catching the slip-up. Apparently, my fingers weren’t fully engaged with my brain when I typed that.

I should have written: “True to Ohm’s law, when the voltage across an ordinary resistor increases, the current flowing through it increases proportionally (I=E/R).”

Please forgive this transgression. I sentence myself accordingly to 60 seconds of being in close proximity to the stench that results from attempting to pass an excessive amount of current through a carbon resistor!

I do defend my statement in the next sentence that in the case of a negative resistance, an increase in voltage results in a reduction in current flow. As I tried to make clear in the article, this (negative resistance) is a special case and does not apply to ordinary resistive circuit elements.

 

The post Letter to the Editor: A Difference of Potential appeared first on Radio World.

Citing links to the Chinese government, the Federal Communications Commission has said no, at least for now, to an application to deliver Mandarin Chinese content from a studio in California to a radio station in Mexico for rebroadcast back into the United States. And it ordered a halt to the arrangement within 48 hours.

This is the latest twist in a story that has been making headlines for a couple of years. The setup — allowed under a previous special temporary authority — has been the subject of complaints from a low-power FM station that serves the Chinese-American community and, more prominently, from critics like Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio who are worried about national security.

The LPFM station has argued that the cross-border deal was “unlawful,” that one of the companies involved is a front for the People’s Republic of China and that the programming is propaganda targeting the large Mandarin-speaking population in the Los Angeles area — allegations that the companies have denied. Meanwhile Sen. Cruz has pushed for legislation to flatly block cross-border broadcasts by entities associated with the Chinese government.

In dismissing the application to deliver content from Irwindale, Calif., to AM station XEWW in the Tijuana/Rosarito area, the FCC did not comment on the content of the programming, and it left the door open to reviewing the situation once it knows more about the companies involved. But it did use the phrase “California studio with links to Chinese government.”

The original application came from GLR Southern California and its parent H&H Group USA, which took an ownership stake in the Mexican AM station two years ago. “The application was dismissed because the parties failed to include in their application a key participant, Phoenix Radio, which produces the Mandarin programming in its studio,” the commission said in a press release highlighting its decision.

“Phoenix Radio is partially owned by two entities with Chinese government ownership, Extra Steps Investment Limited and China Wise International Limited … Phoenix Radio’s known activities at this broadcast programming studio are such that, without reviewing its role as an applicant, the FCC could not evaluate the proposed service.”

The applicants in early 2019 did file an extensive document replying to FCC questions about its business arrangements that included some descriptions of the role of Phoenix. The bureau says now that if a revised application is filed that includes Phoenix Radio, the commission “would review it under applicable law.”

GLR Southern California and H&H Group USA told the commission in 2018 that this arrangement is “not a front” for the Chinese government, and that even if the commission evaluated content, “it would find the programming leaves no room for propaganda.” They have said that the FCC has reviewed “countless programming arrangements that are legally and functionally indistinguishable” from this one.

In that same filing, they said that the LPFM that objected to the arrangement “bases its arguments on wholly unsupported allegations of improper influence in a self-serving effort to protect itself from competition to the Southern California Chinese-speaking American audience. There is a history, and always a danger, that in times of insecurity citizens and the government will make harmful generalizations about race, language and ethnic heritage. … The facts are that the station is carrying programming produced by a publicly traded company that provides Chinese-language programming around the world, including throughout the United States to major TV distributors.” But those arguments have not sufficed to convince the FCC to allow the arrangement to continue, at least for now.

The post FCC Says No to Cross-Border Mandarin Chinese Setup appeared first on Radio World.

Attendees at the National Student Electronic Media Convention in 2018 celebrate an award for KTSW(FM) in Texas in an image from the CBI Twitter feed.

Add another to the list of industry events going virtual this year: the National Student Electronic Media Convention, which had been planned for Baltimore in late October.

It will be online-only instead. The convention is scheduled to go to Orlando in 2021 and return to Baltimore in 2022.

College Broadcasters Inc., which produces the gathering, said its board has been weighing the matter for some time.

“To ensure that our decision was made with the greatest possible amount of data and transparency, we surveyed our membership multiple times and convened several focus groups.”

[Related: “College Radio: After the Shock, Resistance”]

But it cited “the uncertain budgetary situation” faced by many members, institutional travel freezes, a predicted spike in cases in the fall “and the reality that many people are understandably uncomfortable traveling or gathering in groups right now.”

For a current list of events and cancellations, see the Radio World events calendar at https://www.radioworld.com/calendar.

The post College Media Convention Will Be Virtual-Only appeared first on Radio World.

There will be no national IPAWS test this year in the United States. So radio stations, you won’t have to fill out those ETRS forms for awhile.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said the next one will be pushed to 2021 because of the impact that the COVID-19 emergency has had on broadcasters and cable operators.

The agency must test the system at least once every three years.

“FEMA is moving the next national test of the system to 2021 out of consideration for the unusual circumstances and working conditions for those in the broadcast and cable industry,” it stated in the announcement.

“Although systems remain in place for rapid automatic transmission of the test message by broadcast and cable operators, the follow-on reporting activities associated with a national test place additional burdens on technical staff that are already quite busy maintaining as close to normal operation as possible.”

FEMA conducted its fifth nationwide test, focused on the Emergency Alert System, in August 2019. The national Wireless Emergency Alert capability was most recently tested in conjunction with EAS the year before that.

[Read about the results of the 2019 EAS test.]

IPAWS, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, sends emergency alerts and information to the public through EAS and through cell phones and the internet using WEA. The system has been getting use during the pandemic; according to FEMA, officials around the country have sent more than 360 safety messages about the health crisis via WEA and EAS.

[Learn about nationwide alerting tests.]

The post FEMA Says No National Alert Test This Year appeared first on Radio World.

Like a lot of projects, this one started with a need.

One of the Chicago stations that Salem owns has separate sites for day and night modes. One site needs to go off and the other comes on simultaneously. Both sites have older remote controls with system clocks that drift. Plus, Daylight Saving Time is hard to account for because of the limited number of events that can be programmed in the remote control.

A previous engineer had installed two of the Broadcast Tools GPS event controllers, and all was well for a number of years. Then one failed.

The symptom was erratic command execution at random times. The night facility might suddenly pop on in the middle of the day. The fault was easy to see, too. One of the segments of the LED time display, representing one bit of the CPU output, flickered erratically every once in a while.

Because the design has a single data buss running everything from display to commands on a time-multiplexed basis, those flickers occasionally hit the contact closure drivers and strange things happened at the site.

I thought the fix would be straightforward, since I knew which data bit was misbehaving. Broadcast Tools cheerfully provided a schematic and I began diagnosis.

This meant lifting the IC lead associated with that data bit on every item the data buss serves, then waiting for the misbehavior. I had to set up a relay trap to catch the behavior, since days might pass between episodes. At some point, I abandoned the process and declared the Broadcast Tools GPS to be a goner. So that’s where the need arose.

Broadcast Tools doesn’t make that device anymore, probably because more modern remote controls support Network Time Protocol (NTP) and have highly accurate clocks. Not for the first time, I was a technology orphan.

SOLVING THE PROBLEM

Enter the Raspberry Pi. What I needed was a generic GPS-referenced time server that I could use to issue commands with basic relay dry contact closures as the interface. This is one way to do that.

Case open, showing Pi (upper layer) and GPS hat (lower layer). SMA connector leads to an active GPS antenna. Disk shaped object right is a Chronodot, temperature-compensated real-time clock, as backup if GPS and internet fail.

This project uses the Raspberry Pi 3B and assumes you have installed a Linux operating system on your Pi.

Jessie Lite is the distribution I have used for this. There are a hundred sites that explain this, so I won’t do that here.

I will suggest that loading a Linux image with all the graphical user interfaces is probably a waste. In addition, I have found that code writing and compilation for the Pi is best done on the Pi itself and using the command line. Fancy IDEs just take too long to get working right. Use the little editor nano that is installed with Linux. Just my opinion.

Starting with the time part of the project, the Raspberry Pi has a system clock, required for OS operation. I haven’t measured it, but the reports I’ve seen put Pi system clock drift at 15 seconds a day. This isn’t useful for my purpose without help. But the Pi can sync itself using NTP and the vast array of available internet time servers, providing it maintains an internet connection. That might be all that’s needed for many applications.

In my case, I can’t be assured that there will always be a reliable time reference. So I bought a Uputronics GPS Expansion Board that mates with the Raspberry Pi I/O header. They sold me an antenna as well. The board uses the serial UART pins on the Pi and issues a pulse every second when locked. In turn, these pulses trigger a CPU interrupt that “trains” the system clock.

Typical display when timedatectl command is invoked at the command prompt. Shows time is synchronized.

Because the system clock is part of the OS and has no provision for an external sync pulse, the first significant undertaking was recompiling the Linux kernel to add that capability. (To obtain these instructions, just email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Please send me the McCoy instructions.”)

If successful, you’ll have built a Stratum 1 NTP server. This implies accuracy of just one or two milliseconds.

Read up a little on Linux ntpq, the time query language behind NTP. The command ntpq  – p will report the success of timesync. That and the blinking green light on the GPS receiver card are excellent comfort monitors.

Typical display when ntpq -p is invoked from the command prompt. The first line is the pulse-per-second GPS receiver. Small ‘o’ far left is indication that all is well with GPS. Remaining entries are other Stratum 1 servers with calculated adjustments.

In my case, I worried that the GPS signal might become impaired. And if the Pi was headed to a place without internet, a one-second pulse really won’t help unless the Pi gets the right time set initially. Travel to the installation site might be enough to screw things up. So I added a real time clock.

This is a Chronodot, with battery backup (eight years, they say) and 5 seconds per month precision. If I sync the Pi and the Chronodot to the time server here at the studio, the drive to the transmitter shouldn’t introduce meaningful error. And the Chronodot can be set to the system clock — synced by the GPS pulses — on a regular basis, as insurance against simultaneous internet disconnection and GPS reference loss.

EBAY HELPS OUT

Next up is the I/O to allow actions to be initiated by the Pi. The Raspberry Pi CPU is a 3.3 Volt device with not much current handling capability. I decided not to try to find out just how much.

On eBay, I found a batch of fifty 5-volt SPDT printed circuit relays for about 50 cents each and bought them. Like lots of eBay parts, these were a little weird and didn’t exactly fit on a .100 hole spacing kludge board (see photos), but with a little hole reaming and folding over the wiper contact, they would solder. I put eight on the board.

Paranoia about semiconductor failures drove me to install a diode in series with each logic lead from the Pi. Microprocessors don’t like to have their I/O pins dragged outside the CPU supply rails, and the relays need 5 volts. Another diode in the emitter lead guarantees the surplus 2N2222s turn off reliably. I bought a bag of 500 of them in the TO-18 (metal) case about seven years ago and still have a couple hundred left. (Later, I found this pre-assembled relay array complete with driver FETs.)

For ease of testing, I put an LED for each relay alongside the transistors and wired the logic to the 40-pin header on my Pi. A more elegant solution would have been to install a header and use ribbon. Instead, I found some cable with the EIA color conductors inside, stripped the jacket and tacked them to the solder side of the Pi header for connections to 5 volts, ground and the CPU’s GPIO outputs. Having a known working IO device on the Pi makes debugging easier.

There is a protocol and development environment including C language code headers for GPIO compilation at wiringPi.com. Follow the instructions for installation. Get the sample code “blink” to work. It’s the “Hello World” of GPIO. Then you’ll have proofed your compilation process.

After that, the compiled program I wrote takes arguments from the command line used to call it. All that is needed is which relay number, whether pulse (and duration), latch or release. I use the inbuilt scheduler CRON to issue the commands. CRON executes shell scripts (.sh) for each needed function. The scripts have readable names like TxOn.sh. These scripts, in turn, call my program with the appropriate command line arguments.

I noticed right away that CRON alone wasn’t precise enough, time-wise, for some commands. Scheduling with CRON is only precise to the nearest minute. Typically, commands experience a latency of about 2 to 3 seconds from the CRON scheduled time. For a mode change between sites, this just wouldn’t work. So I added some code that, upon program launch, loops while checking the system clock seconds value for a match, actuates the relay, then exits. In my case, a time with seconds = 00 meant the program had to be called by CRON and the script in the previous minute. So for 5:00:00 a.m., the command executes at 4:59 and loops until the system clock seconds equals 00, executes the relay action, then exits.

System is housed in a generic clamshell plastic case. Relay board is generic eBay stuff. Thumb boot drive can be seen lower right.

This whole process could be designed as a program that runs continuously, perhaps reading a text file at launch for the actual schedule of command events. But I like CRON. It might be the oldest remaining component in UNIX and is highly reliable. And using a simple program that performs and exits nearly immediately means the operating system and time functions have unfettered access to the CPU.

Even if you don’t need commands performed but just need a bulletproof NTP time server, this will serve well. Your port 123 needs will be millisecond-accurately served.

Got a project article in mind? Email us to suggest: rweetech@gmail.com.

Read another project by Frank McCoy, “Receivers in a Box on the Roof,” from December 2019.

 

The post Using a Pi to Synchronize Timed Events appeared first on Radio World.

The nice letter from Mr. Vanhooser in the April 22 edition of RW Engineering Extra [“Elevated Counterpoise,” page 8] responding to my earlier article in the Feb. 12 edition was slightly off-point. So I thought I’d reply to his comment.

Ben Dawson’s original article appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of RWEE

The elevated radial system works very well, since, of course, the primary purpose of the “ground” system for a vertical monopole is to provide a return path for the displacement currents. And this was shown clearly in Al Christman’s work that led to the acceptance and use of this system.

But it is not a technique for minimizing the necessity of an extensive “ground” system, merely a different technique, but one which may require as much or nearly as much real estate as a conventional buried radial system.

The same thing is true of two low-profile antennas in common use, the heavily top-loaded “Kinstar” antenna and the inductance loaded electrically short Valcom antenna. Both also excellent solutions to some situations.

And the point of the paper was to describe situations with minimum “ground” systems.

An interesting point about the use of elevated radials in directional arrays is that the return currents aren’t uniformly radial as they are in a single monopole. But numerical analysis techniques can also be used to modify the geometry and perhaps area of above ground systems as well. The currents in a conventional ground system for a directional array were described and discussed in an excellent paper by the late Oggie Prestholdt 30 or 40 years ago.

Regards, and stay safe!

Radio World welcomes letters to the editor at radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post Letter to the Editor: Elevated Concerns appeared first on Radio World.

Equipment manufacturer AEQ shared photos of a recent audio over IP installation project in Spain; view them below.

Radio station À Punt Radio is part of Valencian Media Corp. (Corporació Valenciana de Mitjans de Comunicació). In this project the station has been equipped with AEQ Forum IP Split consoles and visual radio systems.

“In the Central Control room, routing is performed by a BC-2000 digital audio matrix with TDM technology, IP connected with Dante to the studios, whose main element is a Forum Split IP digital mixer,” according to a project summary from AEQ.

[Related: Read the Radio World ebook “AoIP for 2020”]

“Four radio studios were installed around a Forum IP Split digital mixer with 16 faders and a separate audio engine, which relied on the Forum Screen software application to help with control.” Two of these studios also have an automated video camera system.

A Capitol IP mixing console assists assist journalists in recording radio and television broadcast signals.

The work was done by the AEQ System Engineering Department under Bernardo Saiz, supervised by Francisco Calabuig and the À Punt Radio engineering team.

Send news and photos of your radio facility project to radioworld@futurenet.com.

 

Above, the central control room.

 

Four radio studios were installed around a Forum IP Split broadcast digital mixer, with 16 faders and a separate audio engine. The Forum Screen software application helps with control. The console communicates via
Dante with the Central Control Room, Netbox interfaces and other AoIP devices. It features analog microphone, line and headphone inputs/outputs and AES/EBU I/O.

 

Francisco Calabuig, engineer at Corporació Valenciana de Mitjans de Comunicació.

 

Closeup of a guest position. Two studios are equipped with camera automation to produce visual radio by means of data command through the mixer’s Ethernet interface.

 

Communications management, including VoIP telephony and IP/ISDN audio codecs, is performed using their respective control software packages. A Systel IP management application was installed on a PC with touchscreen. Audio codecs are controlled using dedicated Control Phoenix software.

 

The post A Look Inside Valencia’s À Punt Radio appeared first on Radio World.

As director of operations for Holy Spirit Radio, which operates two non-profit 5,000-watt AM radio stations in the Philadelphia market, I often fixate on achieving quality sound at a low cost.

The author records in the Holy Spirit Radio Production Studio.

My best friend since age 3, Jason Lee Sklar, is a DJ at the top-rated Philadelphia Entercom station B101. As you can imagine, there are some major differences in our small AM stations compared to a commercially successful FM like B101. One of the major differences which sounds silly to many but makes a huge difference is the microphones.

Each week, prior to going on the air, Jason shares a selfie on social media. What did I notice? Often not Jason but the shiny Neumann microphone. Top stations, such as B101 or NPR, use the reliable and crisp Neumanns. These microphones are fantastic but often out of the price range for small radio operators such as ours.

Holy Spirit Radio has, like many, used the Shure SM7 and/or Electro-Voice RE20 microphones. These have for many years been standards in the broadcast industry, especially on the AM band. The RE20 was introduced in 1968. The Shure SM7 was introduced in 1972. These are great microphones and they last a long time. I can’t help but wonder if the ones we own are from those original years. More on that in a moment.

These microphones have been perfect for the sound on the AM band, but are we truly AM broadcasters anymore?

Listening has evolved in recent years as younger individuals utilize other methods to listen to their favorite radio content. Many like myself often forgo the typical radio dial and jump to streaming audio via their phones or other devices. Streaming can offer a crisp digital sound compared to the interference that often happens on the AM band.

AFFORDABLE ALTERNATIVE

Two years ago, before some extensive equipment upgrades, I found our sound during live broadcasts to be a little muffled. This was especially noticeable while listening to our live stream. I found it frustrating, but I could not pinpoint the exact cause.

The main studio at Holy Spirit Radio.

One day, we had extensive noise in our production room, and the cause was some microphone cables. This was not a new occurrence. In the past, we would add filters to fix it, but I wanted a more permanent fix. I decided to run to our local Guitar Center to purchase a few cables in an attempt to clear up the noise.

The plan was to hit Guitar Center, buy the cables and get back out. So often, that is my plan when shopping. But as I walked past the display case of microphones, the salesperson observed me salivating over the Neumann TLM 49. It was similar to the microphone I would see Jason share each week on Facebook.

As the salesman asked if I wanted to check it out, I said, “I would love to, but it’s way out of my price range” (over $1,600). As any good salesperson would do, he asked a few questions, such as, “What is your use?” I think I surprised him when I answered, “Radio station studio.” I answered the question, but was not planning to buy a microphone. He suggested that I look at the Aston Origin microphone, which cost $299.

[Related: “How Should I Disinfect My Microphone”]

The microphone has a very industrial look. Not something you would expect in a radio station studio. I checked it out but resisted the impulse to purchase it and got on with the purpose for my visit.

When I got home, I started to Google the Aston Origin and began reading reviews and understanding more about the microphone itself. The microphone was designed and built in the United Kingdom. The designers wanted to build a microphone that had a unique design, was affordable and built in the UK.

They wanted something that could be unique in the market, yet competitive against the microphones built in places like China. Even some of the best and longest-lasting microphones are now built in cheaper places, such as China.

As soon as the Aston microphone hit the market in 2016, it was a hit, especially with UK bands. As word spread, the brand also became a hit in many other parts of the globe. As I continued to search, reviews started popping up, and comparisons to the Neumann were prevalent on the web.

Many people like to review specs, so here are the specs of the Aston Origin:

• Transducer Type: Condenser
• Acoustic Operating Principle: Pressure Gradient
• Directional Polar Pattern: Cardioid
• Frequency Response: 20 Hz–20 kHz (+/-3dB)
• Equivalent Noise Level: 18 dB A-Weighted
• Sensitivity at 1 kHz into 1 kohm: 23.7 mV/Pa
• Maximum SPL for THD 0.5%: 127 dB
• Signal-to-Noise Ratio (rel. 94dB SPL): 76 dB A-Weighted
• Pad Switch: -10 dB

I am personally not a big fan of all the specs or listing of awards on websites. But what struck me was the awe people had for the natural sound of speech.

Around the same time as I discovered the Aston microphone, I was obsessed with the sound of some of the best content producers. I heard a podcast called “The Pub” (episode #17) that featured NPR engineer Shawn Fox discussing the unique sound of their programs. In the podcast, the engineer credited the Neumann U87 microphone ($3,500). One of the features that Shawn discussed was the bass rolloff switch, cutting off some lower frequencies.

The Aston Origin microphone

This was important because of the way listeners often hear the radio with background noise, such as with a window down in a car. He made the point that it is not about fixing the noise levels for studio environment, but instead for the listening environment.

As I reviewed the Aston Origin, I noticed that it also has a bass rolloff switch. They also have a higher-end microphone called the Aston Spirit ($449) which, similar to the Neumann U87, also has a second switch to change the polar pattern.

As I connected all this information, it became inevitable that I would soon be trying out these Aston microphones.

QUICK RESULTS

It seems that every time I go to a store like Guitar Center, I get so caught up in looking around and invariably leave without purchasing one of the items on my list and have to make a return trip to the store. On this occasion, since I was going back to the store anyway, I decided to give the Aston Origin a shot, so I bought a microphone.

The next morning, I set up the mic in our production room. It was simply easier to set it up there since the board could provide phantom power easily. At the time (2017), we had a much older board in our main studio.

Then I asked one of our live hosts to cut over to me in the production room during the show. I wanted to see if anyone noticed a difference, but I would also later check out the recording to see if I could hear a difference.

To my shock, people did notice a difference, including an immediate phone call from the head of the station asking why I sounded so much better than the others on the air. I then told him about the experiment. Needless to say, by the end of that day we bought the total supply out of the three area Guitar Center stores. We replaced all our mics.

Just to be clear, there is good reason the Shure SM7B and Electro-Voice RE20 have been standards for so long. It became evident after I replaced our mics that our older mics may have been from one of those early years. We took the time to take them apart, and we found the entire insides to be disintegrated. Based on what we found under the hood, I am shocked they sounded as good as they did. In many ways, I am amazed that they even worked.

Up until about two years ago, we often did not replace older equipment but instead patched it up to keep it running. This microphone replacement kicked off many upgrades, and today, our sound is outstanding over the air and on the streams. Just like these microphones, we attempt to keep costs low, but we also weigh the cost with listener experience as well as ongoing maintenance and longevity. The Aston Origin was very helpful in positioning us with this mindset and well worth the investment we made.

In life and in radio broadcasting, it is easy to be jealous of what others have, but at the end of the day, with the help of others, you can find things that are just as cool but cost far less with very similar and, in some cases, even better results.

[Also by this author: “Be Smart When Thinking About UPS”]

The post Guitar Center, a Broken Cable & Facebook Jealousy appeared first on Radio World.

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