Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

During today’s 5:30 PM broadcast of Marketplace, KUSP switched back to our main on-air studio for the first time after renovating the studio — completing our Upgrade 2011 project.

Just after we started the program, Chief Engineer Brant Herrett made some last-minute changes to the software configuration of our new Wheatstone digital audio control surface. Brant had been working in this room pretty much non-stop over the past few days ironing out the last few kinks in the installation.

Marketplace has one local break, about halfway through the program. And so it was, at 5:46, that our new afternoon news host, Duncan Lively, turned down the Marketplace transition music, switched on the mic, and did our first post-upgrade local break from the main studio.

The number on the back of Mic 1 has always been upside down, for reasons I have never understood. Why mess with tradition?

Here is another view of the new studio, looking over Duncan’s right shoulder. You can see J.D. Hillard, who oversees all our news, talk and information programming, looking as if he’s cueing Duncan to do something, which as best as I can remember, he wasn’t. You can also see an indication of radio’s obsession with time: there are no less than four clocks visible in this picture!

We are all very happy to have successfully completed this project — KUSP’s first major studio renovations in fifteen years. Thanks go out again to the hundreds of KUSP contributors who made a gift in support of Upgrade 2011. Looking back at the blog posts from this project, I hope you’ll be able to see what a tremendous positive difference your generosity has made at our station.

Later on this spring we’ll have an open house at the studio, so you’ll be able to see all of this in person!

Greetings from the land of studio construction!

Here are some photos from the construction of KUSP’s new on-air studio — the last step of Upgrade 2011.

The last on-air break for our old equipment was at the end of Your Call with Rose Aguilar on Wednesday, January 11. Morning Host Jim Sintetos did the honors, bringing down the curtain on a studio configuration that had stayed pretty much the same for the past fifteen years.

We moved on-air operations across the hall to Production Studio 1 over the course of the next few hours, in time for Wes Sims to host Marketplace and All Things Considered from the temporary set-up. Here’s one of Wes’ All Things Considered breaks on Wednesday afternoon.

As soon as we were up and running in Production 1 our construction brigade started tearing out the old on-air gear. When we removed the audio mixing console we were astounded by how much stuff had gotten stuck under it over the last decade and a half!

Among the finds were a KUSP program schedule from 1997 — the year this equipment was installed — and a pledge form we lost during the Spring 2009 pledge drive! Happily, the member who made the lost pledge came through again later on that same year.

In what seemed like hardly any time at all, the equipment was pulled out and the recyclable materials sorted into piles.

Here the interview microphones (which we will keep using) are resting next to some of the hundreds of feet of analog audio cable that we no longer need.

We dismantled the cabinetry and pulled up the worn-out carpet — and were reminded that, once upon a time, people were permitted to smoke in the on-air studio! The carpet pad never lies. Once we got all the floor covering out of there the odor dissipated fairly quickly. Our carpet installers fixed up a few problems with the floor and applied the most environmentally-friendly adhesive we could find.

Our new carpet, selected with help from Lorri Kershner Design, went down next. The transformation was amazing.

This morning, the new studio furniture arrived, custom designed for KUSP by cabinetmaker and host of It Takes All Kinds, Bruce Larsen. The first puzzle was to figure out how all the pieces fit together; a challenge successfully met by Bruce and KUSP Lifetime Member Mac Hartley, pictured here.

While Mac and Bruce assembled the furniture, KUSP Chief Engineer Brant Herrett attended to the studio plumbing — literally. Though these plastic pipes will pass the high-speed Ethernet cables that connect the on-air studio’s equipment to the rest of the station.

After a few hours, Mac and Bruce got all the pieces correctly oriented, level, plumb, and square. While it appears that Mac is engaged in a religious observance, he is in fact holding two sections of the furniture together while Bruce (not visible) puts in the requisite fasteners from the other side…

On the way out the door tonight, Bruce said we were past Step 5 of the project. I’m glad someone is keeping track. Next we assemble more cabinetry and install the mounts for the various computer screens that will let our on-air staff know what’s going on. Stay tuned…

This is likely to be the last post in this blog for the year (unless something especially interesting happens in the next week) — and I wanted to finish by showing you how our Upgrade 2011 studio renovation is coming along.

There are three studios at KUSP. Renovations in one are essentially complete, and another studio is nearly finished. Here’s a look at how they turned out!

Production Studio 2 was the first to get overhauled, starting in September. You can see its skin and bones back at this blog post.

This picture shows J.D. Hillard at work this afternoon. To his left is the “control surface,” which is where studio users mix the different audio sources and send them to the right destinations. This was always called “the board” (or by some of my British friends, “the desk”). Up to now at KUSP, a wire with the audio running down it would connect each source of audio to the board, and mixing and switching would happen inside the board itself. Now, what we have (in combination with the computer screen behind it) is more of a virtual device that sends instructions to wherever the audio is coming from (or going to) — anywhere in the station. Gigabit Ethernet switches connect everything together.

In front of J.D. is another computer screen on which we record and edit digital audio files; typically, the audio sources for that editing (such as the microphone in the picture) are what we have assigned to the volume controls, on-off switches, and other knobs (real or virtual) on the control surface.

I’ve written about the “blades” that are at the heart of the system before. These are the devices that take analog or digital audio signals into the system (converting the signals to packets that can move around on the audio Ethernet environment), or convert an output stream to a standard digital or analog audio signal so it can leave the studio (or be fed to speakers or headphones). This pair of blades has been rolling along nicely in our audio server rack for about two months now!

Once we had Production Studio 2 up and running, we started in on our main recording studio, Production Studio 1. Here, Bruce Larsen is carving the right-sized hole in the countertop for this studio’s control surface.

And here’s how the room looks today, back in operation. There is still a little bit of finish work to do but we’ve been using the room most of December. The first KUSP show to be produced here, by the way, was Bonnie Jean’s fine late-night program, “The Playlist.” Blades and source equipment (CD players, tape decks, and so on) are installed in the upright racks to the right and left of the control surface, which is a bigger, more versatile version of the one in Production Studio 2. People we interview sit on the opposite side of the counter, and the window looks into the Peter Troxell Performance Studio (also known as “Studio T”), which will finally get permanent equipment about ten years after my predecessor, Peter, started that project.

This close-up gives you an idea how much control we have of each audio source now. Any audio signal at KUSP can be assigned to any control channel in any studio; the display in the middle of the channel strip tells you what’s assigned right now. The blue and white buttons at the bottom turn the audio on and off; the vertical slide fader adjusts the sound level; and the buttons above the display let you select different destinations for the audio.

What’s left to do? We’ve been sidetracked somewhat by delays in getting carpet installed in the last studio to upgrade, which is our main on-air studio, but today we got word that the carpet should finally get to Santa Cruz the middle of next week. We will speedily move our on-air operations into Production Room 1 (so if you hear some unusual flubs on the air right around New Year’s, don’t blame overindulgence by the hosts!) and get the last renovations done. Then it’s on to 2012!

Once again, I want to express my gratitude to the hundreds of KUSP supporters who made special gifts in the first half of 2011 to match our federal grant and make Upgrade 2011 a reality. It’s a joy to produce radio in such a flexible and up-to-date facility, and we owe it all to you. See you next year!

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)…

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!

Another piece of KUSP’s “Upgrade 2011″ equipment has arrived. Sean, who hosts our afternoon news programs Monday through Friday, is pictured here holding our new Digital ENDEC (short for “encoder/decoder”), manufactured by Sage Alerting Systems.

A broadcaster’s role in distribution of emergency information has become steadily more complicated through the years. The FCC, FEMA, and other governmental authorities are slowly implementing a major overhaul of the Emergency Alert System, through which broadcasters and cable systems receive emergency information from public safety agencies and forward it along to you. The vast majority of EAS messages (here in the Monterey Bay area, and nationwide) originate from the National Weather Service.

The EAS we operate now was developed before the Internet was widely used. It’s difficult to quickly extract the details of an emergency message from an EAS transmission and provide it on line — or update it as more information becomes available. Finally, most EAS equipment now installed at radio stations (all of which has to be approved for use by the FCC) is completely analog and wouldn’t integrate well with the all-digital audio environment we’re building at KUSP.

Consequently, we acquired the shiny blue box Sean is holding. It’s a small specialized computer that effectively acts as a content aggregator. It has audio ports to monitor the EAS message feeds we get now (from the Weather Service and from other broadcasters) and Internet connectivity that enables it to receive info directly from emergency management agencies. When an emergency message is received, the unit processes the information, and then it makes the message available for live broadcast as well as making it accessible in other formats.

In dollar terms, it’s not a huge part of Upgrade 2011, but we think it’s an important part.

Now that we’ve just started installing the new equipment for KUSP’s “Upgrade 2011″ project, it seemed like the right time to get a couple of photos of our starting place. Many people have visited KUSP in the 30+ years our studios have been at 203 8th Avenue, but far more folks haven’t seen the place. So…. here’s the tour!

This is our main on-air studio. There’s almost always someone sitting in the chair in the foreground; I took the picture on Saturday morning right in the middle of the third half of Car Talk, so we didn’t have to have a person there for a little while. Under the big digital clock is our main audio console, the single most expensive piece of equipment we’ll replace as part of Upgrade 2011. Among other things, you’ll see only one of the four audio level meters still lights up (the bulbs are hard to find and the sockets are problematic). There’s a hole where a yellow “OFF” button should be on the far right end (can’t get the parts).

You can also see our three on-air CD players (dark grey rectangles, one to the left of the console, two to the right) and the two turntables we use to play records (one on each side; the one on the right has our program log book sitting on its plastic cover). The top computer screen shows the status of the digital audio storage system that plays back recorded programs; the bottom one is a general purpose computer where we look up traffic reports, weather forecasts, and so on.

There is exactly one piece of Upgrade 2011 equipment in this “before” picture. In the right-hand rack, between the two pieces of light gray-painted equipment, is a skinny black unit with some blue stickers on it. That’s a Denon CN-F650R professional audio recorder; here is a better look at it (thanks to Denon’s web site):

This is for recording in-studio performances, live interviews, and similar kinds of events. Instead of using tapes or CD’s, this device puts the audio on a removable USB storage device that plugs in the front. We’re hoping this will be more reliable and lower maintenance than the tape and CD recorders it replaces. In the main picture there’s a purple CD recorder above the Denon and a Panasonic DAT (digital audio tape) recorder below it (partially obscured by a taped-up note – you can see that we don’t use DAT tape on the air that much any more!)

Across the hall from the on-air studio is Production Studio 1:

We record most every kind of program we have in here, and we can link this studio to studios anywhere in the world through a couple of different digital audio delivery systems, for either live or recorded programs. The equipment layout is very similar to the on-air studio; this is useful because (1) we can use this as a back-up on-air studio if the main studio is down for maintenance and (2) it makes training our volunteers and new employees easier. No new equipment is visible in this studio yet. We are looking forward to replacing the CRT-type computer monitor and regaining some much-needed counter space!

On the other side of the wall behind Production 1′s computer monitor is Production Studio 2:

“Studio” is kind of overstating the current capability of this room. I’m told it was built in the 1980′s as an announcer’s booth; you can stand in the middle of the room and touch opposite walls in one dimension. After years of disuse we revived it when KUSP Reports ramped up its number of stories in 2009, and now it’s in near-constant use as an editing location during the day. In the picture you can see (left to right) the room’s DAT recorder, a small tabletop CD player, the microphone and a very small audio mixer, and the computer screen for our digital audio editor. This room will be totally overhauled as part of Upgrade 2011.

Our final stop is our satellite receiver rack:

This equipment lets us receive all our nationally and internationally-distributed programs. Some programs (like Morning Edition) are live as you hear them, while others are time-shifted by a few hours (The Diane Rehm Show is an example) or a few days (the Friday night broadcast of This American Life). All of these programs are delivered to the Public Radio Satellite System’s main transmitting uplink station in Washington, DC, and received by the hundreds of local public radio stations across the country. This is an all-digital system and most of the units mounted in the rack are actually specialized small computers running Linux. These devices receive the satellite signal and either turn it back into audio to run live from the studios or route it over to the digital audio storage network.

With this gear, the more green lights that are on, the better.

The receivers in the top of the rack are brand new and will go into service after we finish Upgrade 2011. In the middle of the picture is a “patch bay” for the rack. We move audio feeds now by plugging and unplugging cords in a patch panel that might have been built 70 years ago — with the same parts that were used in telephone switchboards for decades…

Hope you liked the tour – as we get more stuff installed, I’ll have more posts.

Thursday, June 30, was the final day to collect contributions for our Upgrade 2011 fund-raising project (about which I’ve written before). In order to collect all of the available matching funds from the federal government and finish the project, we needed to raise $75,000 locally. At the end of the day on Thursday, the total we collected was $81, 871!

So the project is now underway. As we go along with the construction this summer I’ll take a shot at documenting our progress here with stories, pictures, and maybe some video. Many of the folks I got to know as we raised the local support were really interested in the details of the project. I hope this will be fun and interesting for readers; watch this space…

This afternoon KUSP completed a three-day on-air drive to wrap up Upgrade 2011. Between Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon over 300 donors contributed $30,000 to the project.

This was the last piece of fundraising for a project that started in 2010, when KUSP received one of the last matching grants awarded by the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP), which funded critical technology projects at public radio and TV stations for almost 50 years until the White House and Congress eliminated it in April.

PTFP projects usually require the station to raise an equal or greater amount of money for the project in the communities they serve. We began raising the required $75,000 from our listeners over the winter. An event for donors in Big Sur in January, and another at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in February, got things underway; many Leadership Circle contributors added their support this spring.

With the June 30 deadline for matching contributions approaching, we turned to our entire listening audience to provide the last piece of the fundraising puzzle, and we’re delighted (as always) that you responded so quickly.

We’ve already begun lining up the Upgrade 2011 equipment; major work will happen over the summer, with final project completion set for September.

If you haven’t yet made a gift to support Upgrade 2011 you still can – just follow this link and select “Upgrade 2011″ when you check out.