Genelec Speakers for Everyone
I have put off discussing an item that we installed in every room that has been remodeled. Monitor speakers. Early on in our search we looked at various solutions to the monitor situation. Should we go traditional? Should we go quality? Where should we go? We actually had demonstrations on a couple of types and we finally made a decision: Amplified monitors by Genelec.
I have installed 8020, 8030, and 8040 series speakers by Genelec in the rooms based on needs. The 8030 was the standard for the control rooms. In one control room and the large production room we actually went with the 8040. In our small production room and recently built Studio M we went with the 8020 series. All do what they are intended to do and the sound quality is fantastic, even with the small 8020 monitors. The main need was maintaining line of site. Second was sound quality. And, of course, for the rocker station they like loud.
When you think about control room monitoring how far do you have to go before you have gone overboard? How much quality do you need in the monitor speakers when the talent is mainly focused on air monitoring (are we on the air) and segue ways. The rest of the time the talent is talking on the phone or other preparations, or actually watching t.v. Then they take their break and wear headphones for that. Of course you do not want to cheapen the sound, so a compromise was necessary. After a few listening tests and that question, “how much do you really listen to the monitors?” the decision to go with Genelec was made. We received quality sound in a small package for a reasonable price.
For the FM949 control room, the 8040. The rock station wanted a bit more for rocking, so the 8040s were installed. Still maintaining the low profile they got the big sound they were looking for.
For Studio C, the 8020. Set next to the SAS Rubicon SL-8 console, these little guys pack a big punch. This little room is a production and voice tracking work-horse.
And yes, we did consider a subwoofer or two, but opted out. If we wanted we could install subs, so even if you are considering an Urban AC station, consider the Genelec. See the links on the right to the Genelec web site.
What a start to the day!
Yeah, I tweeted this, but I just have to write it out. How often does one get kicked in the head by a bum!
We go to Starbucks pretty much every morning downstairs outside of work. We see the Mission Valley bum population on a regular basis. We even give some of them nicknames: Sea Captain, Token, etc. Well, there is this one bum we nickname Obie Bum. He usually has a pale, drab green blanket draped over his head and bows and fiddles with his fingers. Beard. Sometimes it is a dirty, light brown blanket. He appears to be harmless and ignores most people. Today he wandered up and asked for some money. JR and I refuse, politely. Obie Bum moves behind us and starts babbling weirdness. We both lean over and say, “what?” We go back to our conversation when all of a sudden I get popped in the head! I jump up and JR says, “He just kicked you!”
Obie Bum slides into the Starbucks where JR constrains him and we get someone to call 911. The store manager and employees get nervous and start telling us not to break anything. JR releases the dude. We watch as he slides out of the store and wanders off. I spot him back on the other side watching us, and then he slinks away. 30 minutes later the cops arrive. We tell the story and they tell us there is not much to do. JR realizes he did get a scratch on the hand. They would just take the bum to mental health upon which they would release him 4 hours later. No serious injuries, so the DA would let it slide.
This bum has become more aggressive from what we hear, so we let the Starbucks manager know before we split.
It is a shame that these people are out, yet, I do not see why we cannot do something to “fix” the issue. All I can say is beware that neighborhood bum. Keep your guard up. Do not give them money as it encourages them to continue harassing folks. Now it is on to business!
Cheers!
Some NRSC Stuff Regarding HD Power Levels
OK here is the NRSC-G202 FM IBOC Total Digital Sideband Power. I have not read the document as of yet, but I will shortly. Figure it is better to get the information out. 😉
I also hit the power calculator at the NRSC site. Power Calculator>
Would it be helpful to run links in my Pages? I think I will!
iPad in Action
I was able to see an iPad in action in the real world during a brief demonstration. I like the concept. The VPN worked. You need to purchase the VNC app. The think worked as advertised. I just cannot justify the price, nor is it handy if you need to do any amount of typing.
Price: $600 for the 32GB Wi-Fi only version. Holy Cow! $729 if you want the Wi-Fi + 3G, and the service plan is sold separately. I am a fan of convenience, but at what price?
Typing. Like the iPod, typing is a pain. If there is any amount of note taking or “administrating” that is necessary, you must be a “hunt & peck” master. I’m old school in that I know how to type, using all ten fingers (or 8 fingers and 2 thumbs). Apps that let you poke at icons and shows results is nice. I just need to learn how to write apps. Maybe if I learn I can earn some money.
Anyways, I like it. I just need to justify the cost and with the lack of budget at our location we won’t be getting one or two any time soon.
Cheers!
NV20 Modification
As we have the first NVs here, we did a modification yesterday on the NV20s which will allow for a quick reset of the embedded AUI computer. We found that on occasion we need to reboot the AUI due to some quirk of nature. It is a PC after all. NO, this does NOT effect the operation of the transmitter. Don’t be scared. We added a toggle switch! Basically this switch will turn power off to the AUI. We chose to switch power instead of doing a reset because you never know when you need to shut her down without turning the transmitter off.
We mounted the switch to the cover. Yes, that means we need to be careful when removing the cover for service, but how often would we need to do this. The only time we ever remove the cover is to reset the AUI! You can find a picture of the mod here: NV-Switch Modification
The installation was simple. We have also considered connecting a switch to our remote control for the super rare case that we cannot access the AUI remotely. We have never had this situation, so we tossed the idea.
Happy modifications!
Keeping Busy
Why title it a “weekly update” when it has been more than a week? Shoot, it’s been a couple. Since my last post when Wide Orbit visited, all my updates have been tweeted. I had some family time, along with our travel group, at Disneyland! My kid loves the place, as does the wife. So what happened since? If you follow them tweets, then you know about AT&T. Well, we also worked on some HD2 preparations for one station, caught up on some EAS news, a UPS failure, and pretty much had busy work to do.
AT&T does not make me happy. That control circuit for our Burk went down in an interesting way this week which meant a little late night work to stay legal. It was not a complete circuit failure. There was two way continuity, sort of. The interesting and most tell-tale sign that the issue was at the CO (central office) was the echo sound I heard with my trusty TS-22A test set. The studio unit actually should a circuit was there and some of the channels reported readings, but no all. Some channels just showed dashes (—-) for the reading. When studio and transmitter units were placed back-to-back, they worked great. When AT&T finally reported back the issue was resolved the message was quite vague with an admission to a card replacement at the CO. I have since followed up with this question, “Why does the repair of this circuit always come down a card replacement at the CO?” No response as of yet.
As we push to air an HD2 channel, the question of EAS came up. I am still looking for any ruling regarding the necessity, but we are going to cover it anyways. Better safe than sorry. As we prepared, we discovered the old MSRP (multi-station relay panel) of our Sage Endec was not working. After serial data checks and a quick call to Sage to verify how it is supposed to work (we have never used it), I found the problem. The electrolytic capacitors had small holes and leaked. Not obvious until the circuit board was removed. Once replaced, the MSRP worked flawlessly. Usually the wall-wart power transformers are to blame, but this time we did the rare component level troubleshooting.
Why the MSRP? We wired the contact closure in conjunction with our SAS frame to create a “priority” interrupt and cross point to feed the EAS to the HD2 channel whenever the mother station (main channel) ran a test or relayed one. Who knows what other fine thinking we will come up with next.
We installed the new UPS’s after the failure of a couple weeks ago. We did both racks as the two that were in there were of the same age and type. As this was on our radar, when we visited our pee-shooter site, we did a simulated power outage on the UPS there. All worked well. This begs the question, “how often do you check on your critical UPS installations?” I have another question: What type of UPS installation do you have? Why did you choose the way you did?
That’s all for now! The little one is calling for me. Enjoy your day!
Cheers!
Wide Orbit Automation
I wish to quickly thank Wide Orbit for the visit yesterday. I must say I am quite impressed with the work they have done with the Radio Automation system. If you have not looked at this system, you should. Now if I can only convince the company of our “need” for this.
A couple of years ago a colleague and I visited Google to see what the system could do. We spent the whole day there discussing what the system does and what is planned and what we would like to see. Yesterday, as Wide Orbit, we got to see what they have done and what they have incorporated into the system. I must say, very nice job.
If I have a chance to evaluate the system, I will. It would not do the system justice to evaluate just on a demonstration. I really believe, now, that I would prefer this “streamlined” and efficient system over any other product out there today. Nice work.
CAP Ready? FEMA Approves It
FEMA Announces Adoption Of New Standard For Emergency Alerts
Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:07:33 -0500
WASHINGTON,D.C.– The Department of Homeland Security’s Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) today announced the adoption of a new
digital message format for the Integrated Public Alert and Warning
System (IPAWS), the nation’s next generation emergency alert and warning
network. The goal of IPAWS is to expand upon the traditional Emergency
Alert System by allowing emergency management officials to reach as many
people as possible over as many communications devices as possible,
such as radio, television, mobile phones, personal computers and other
communications devices. The current Emergency Alert System relies
largely on radio and television to communicate to people.
EAS & CAP: Are you ready?
What Happens when FEMA Approves CAP?
Nice article from Radio Magazine. My answer to this question is: NO. Why? I was told to cut it out of the budget and wait for the final approval. So, did I plan on it? Yes. What does this mean here? I do not know. I suspect we will all be asked to purchase the same equipment throughout the group. I’ve priced them out. I am settled on one (the Sage Endec because we are used to it).
The other disturbing thing is network connectivity. We are not many of the other groups. We limit what equipment touches the outside world. All of the sudden we have stuff all over the place and firewall ports opening up left and right to accommodate these things. We have created another network off the house network for this. Security seems to be the least important thing. How would you like to be an LP1 or LP2 and have someone hack your CAPs feed and set off an alert? Disquieting, eh? When you setup your network, be prepared to secure it. Common sense, folks. Good luck.
Now where am I going to get the money for these boxes?
Cheers!
Friday Update: 9/17/2010 (For lack of a better title!)
I figured I would update all on the workings that occurred while we were concentrated on our Studio M build. As of today, Studio M is a big success. I think I’ll post some progress pictures on the website as soon as I can. (I have an issue at work with FTP uploads, damn firewall.) Today is the first day with live audience in the studio. They squeezed 20 people in the room. HVAC is holding up. They are loving it. Comfort level is good. He’s commenting on it as I write.
While we were working on this thing there has been other items that needed taking care of. One is our Nautel V1-D. Believe it or not, our front panel overlay, which has the buttons for On/Off and LED display indications seemed to cause mysterious Off commands resulting in shutting the transmitter off. In reviewing the schematic and doing the troubleshooting with our friends at Nautel, the Off switch is paralleled with the remote Off command. This makes sense in terms of being able to override the remote and shut the transmitter down if necessary. Do to what I believe was thermal expansion and contraction we had random off-air situations do to the transmitter receiving an Off command. We eliminated the remote control as the cause leaving the overlay. Once the overlay was bypassed, the issue went away. A new overlay has been installed and all is well now.
You ask, “Overlay?” Yes. It is an interesting design in that the switch is not a big, square switch, but something similar to a keyboard micro-switch, for lack of a better description. As it is part of the physical front panel, there is no way to replace or fix the switch. I am curious now if this issue will begin to surface again as the box ages.
As if we had nothing else to do, we did a software upgrade on the NV20s. We moved from version 2.7 to version 2.8.3. We had no issue with 2.7, per se. We did have one, just one, occurrence where one, and only one, NV20 had an off-air situation. We took a data hit on our T-1 STL which caused a loss of AES audio briefly. The exciter did not recover, so we had a transmitter on the air with no audio. Very weird. After an exciter reboot, all was good. This issue would probably never occur again, but as a precaution we updated the software as there is a fix for this rare situation. Only three known occurrences of this from what I have heard, and of course I would be one of them!
Update on the Harris Flexstar issue. We’ve been running the beta firmware for months now without incident. Our diversity delay drifts a bit, still. Our center frequency drifts a bit (last measurement was +270Hz). The real thing is we have not been off the air due to an exciter lock. No RF muting. I would say we have made significant progress on that one. As things slow down, I will request the release version of the firmware and complete the cycle. At this time, if it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it.
Last, be assured I will post some details on our Studio M build. What we use and how we overcame some situations. The final decision is whether I write it up for a trade. If this is the case, then I cannot have a previous post on that that. Stay tuned. Hope you all are enjoying updates as I file them.
Cheers!
Tech Notes from the Field 
