Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

Today, the long-awaited (and somewhat delayed) shipment of digital audio routing and control equipment arrived from Wheatstone Corporation in New Bern, North Carolina. As luck would have it, I was having lunch across town when the truck arrived, so there is no photo record of how the KUSP staff broke things down when the shipping container proved to be too big to get though the station’s front door.

Duncan Lively, our Director of Foundation and Business Support, took this picture after everything got inside:

You see Chief Engineer Brant Herrett holding the “control surface” for Production Studio 2 in his hands; this is the panel with all the knobs and switches on it that the people in the studio touch. It’s all wrapped up in plastic in this shot.

To the right of Brant is what looks like a stack of industrial-strength pizza boxes. Inside those are all the audio “blades” I wrote about and showed you in a previous post. Each blade supports eight audio sources and destinations, so multiplying that all out gives you a sense of how much audio this system will ultimately be controlling at once.

The shadowy figure in the background is Steve Laufer, KUSP’s head of digital media and chief photographer. We’ll get some more pictures of the new stuff together for you in the days ahead.

Thanks again to the hundreds of KUSP donors who made this project possible. The stuff is almost all in the building now! Woo-hoo!

Today we passed a minor milestone in the Upgrade 2011 project. The biggest part of the investment is a digital audio network within the station that connects all the studios together. Audio moves from place to place under the control of the on-air hosts and recording engineers in each studio. All the audio moves as packets of addressable digital data on a really really fast Ethernet network.

Audio gets in and out of the network through boxes called “blades.” When the audio starts as a digital signal (our satellite feeds from NPR or BBC, for example) the blades convert the digital signal to a format compatible with everything else, wraps it up in the packets, puts an address on it, and sends it off to its destination. All these same steps happen to our analog signals too (from the studio microphones or turntables, for example) — with the additional step of an analog-to-digital conversion in the blade.

We got our first two blades to experiment with a couple of days ago, and today we propped them up in one of our equipment rooms and connected them to our network to see if we could make them work. Here’s a look at one of the blades:

And this is a close-up of part of the front panel. I haven’t worked with equipment that has a “snake mode” before!

While we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with some of the new equipment we’ve been working on renovating the physical studios too. First to get overhauled is Production Studio 2, primarily used by KUSP news reporters and our program operations staff (people who check to see that the right show is on at the right time, that kind of thing). In this first shot Bruce Larsen, co-host of “It Takes All Kinds” on Sunday afternoon, is peeling off the old wall covering and trim:

Once we got the old gray carpet off the walls, we discovered that when the room was built, the drywall had just been nailed in place (kind of randomly) and there were huge gaps and uneven seams (like 1/2″ of difference in height from one piece to the next). This wasn’t going to work with what we had in mind for the room. Consequently, we had to bring in someone who knew about hanging drywall to nail things properly, then patch the gaps and tape the seams.

Once we got the drywall cleaned up the room looked like this:

Then we brought in more folks to hang our new sisal wall covering, furnished by Greenspace in Santa Cruz. Much more attractive than the old gray carpet, and the lighter color makes the room much less cave-like.

Next we will put the countertops back in, followed by the equipment — and then we can get back to work in here! (and move on to Production Room 1)…

Today the public radio world is celebrating the news that Jad Abrumrad, who produces and hosts Radiolab along with Robert Krulwich, has been named a MacArthur Fellow.

Radiolab’s home station, WNYC, has a nice blog post about Jad’s award, which is linked here.

Radiolab is in its tenth season. Only a few shows are made every year, and stations (including ours) tend to schedule them somewhat erratically. You can sample the entire archive here.

Jad is not the first public radio person to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Previous honorees include Dave Isay, who created StoryCorps; Bill Siemering, who thought up a fairly successful program called “All Things Considered;” and a friend and mentor, Hugo Morales, who founded Radio Bilingüe — whose network of stations includes KHDC in Salinas.

Many of the poets, artists, and musicians among the MacArthur Fellows have been heard on KUSP — none more notably than Maestra Marin Alsop, Music Director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, who became a MacArthur Fellow in 2005.

As I browsed the all-time list of MacArthur Fellows I realized all over again what a blessing it is to work in public radio and be able to occasionally bump up against the likes of Marin, and Hugo, and Dave, and Jad — and to bring something of their astonishing creativity to you on KUSP!

Most of the equipment KUSP is installing as part of Upgrade 2011 is manufactured in New Bern, North Carolina. New Bern got hit rather hard by Hurricane Irene, and the manufacturing plant was closed for a while.

All our equipment is reportedly safe and sound, but we don’t know what effect this delay will have on our overall construction timetable. We promised our federal grant-makers that we would have the project complete by the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30. We will try as hard as we can to bring this all in on time.

Meantime, we’re working away at getting the studios ready. The digital audio signals will run from room to room in the station over a new Gigabit Ethernet network. Up to now all of the audio in KUSP’s studio gets from point A to point B over regular old audio cable — one pair of wires for each signal (two pairs for a stereo circuit). With as many sources and destinations as we have, that’s an enormous amount of cable and connectors. There’s probably at least two miles of wire installed in our studio.

The new system multiplexes all the digital audio signals onto the Ethernet network, so every source can be routed to everyplace in the building. This is a great thing for us, because it will give us more flexibility to use studios for different purposes at different times. Our main studio is now on the air 24/7, but it would be a great place to record music shows including in-studio live performances. We don’t always need all the capability of the main studio, so now with our new digital audio system, when we’re doing something relatively simple like broadcasting “The Diane Rehm Show” (which comes in to us more-or-less complete from WAMU in Washington), we can tell the digital audio network to run Diane out of one of our smaller studios, giving us a two-hour window of time to bring musicians and interviewers into the big room and do something fun — which we can put up on kusp.org right away and broadcast later, if we want.

Of course, putting all that responsibility on the digital audio network means it better work perfectly. So, most of the day on Thursday 9/1, we put connectors on the new Ethernet cables and tested them for proper operation.

Here’s our Chief Engineer (well, his hands) fitting the proper connector on one of our Ethernet cables.

And here’s a view of one of our main equipment racks, showing how much cable we wrestle with now. It’s easy to get a circuit lost in here; we can decommission a good bit of what you see in the picture once the new equipment is up and running.

Happily, all our network cables met the speed and reliability tests we threw at them, which is a source of relief to the technical staff.

Thanks to Steve Laufer for the photos. Onward!