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!

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!

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.