Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

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 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)…