And taken a few moments ago, BBC Scotland from right outside my hotel in Glasgow.
11 Likes
The new ABC Sydney TV studio in Parramatta. It’s an interesting set. Has some curves while copying the whole BBC style with a large LED Wall in the middle of the studio. Also it is quite small too and next to the main entrance.
9 Likes
Nice caps! Hard to see it much but it looks quite barebones.
Must say, I’m quite sick of the ABC always copying BBC over the years.
The lighting better be improved. Sydney’s lighting is one of the worst in the country.
7 Likes
Looks very decent - also appears to be a seated desk instead of a standing one.
Wall is definitely inspired by BBC.
Weird thing is with the NSW set was The Drum had decent lighting on one side of the studio, yet they couldn’t (and still can’t) do the same with the news set.
6 Likes
Complete waste of money. The control room remains in Ultimo as per my understanding.
7 Likes
Another reason why this whole “let’s shift some staff further into Sydney” move is ridiculous if they still need to control it from the same control room - may as well just build the new set in the existing studio.
5 Likes
Doing it on the cheap so as to produce a shopfront presence in the suburbs for political reasons, definitely not operational.
5 Likes
Probably because of the dual weekend presenter that was going to be done before (Her name has slipped my mind) went on maternity leave?
1 Like
Weekend presenters are Lydia Feng and Nakari Thorpe (one that was maternity leave, but is back now) - they aren’t doing dual presenters, they are sharing roles (i.e. one does a weekend, then the other).
Seated desk probably has something to do with the fact that they are planning to one or two shifts for the News Channel out of Paramatta.
7 Likes
Looks like a bit of a 360ish set?
3 Likes
I don’t quite know what makes a large LED wall unique to the BBC - everyone is doing it. Nor do any of the ABC’s current sets look like either the national or regional BBC News sets.
5 Likes
I think @Nicholas might have been referring more to the fact that said LED wall is curved, which is something of a BBC trademark. Of course other broadcasters use LED walls as well, be they curved, straight or otherwise… but the BBC is particularly known for them.
5 Likes
Right. I’d say the Nine News sets are more focused on a curved wall than the BBC. The BBC’s national news and breakfast sets have one curved wall for the secondary presenting area. The BBC’s newsroom set has three plasmas on a wall. The old BBC World studio has a flat news wall. Regional sets have flat news walls.
The regional sets are most comparable to our state sets - nothing like the ABC
4 Likes
I’m a volunteer at Radio 3MBR-FM I just thought you might like to see our broadcast facility at Murrayville, Victoria.
19 Likes
That must sound very crispy/tinny on air, why do you have the transmitter running with 75uS Pre-emphasis Australia uses 50uS Pre-emph?
Also do you have any Pre-emphasis turned on before the transmitter e.g. from the processor or studio to transmitter link as I see you’re feeding the transmitter with MPX, if you do it will be additive & make the audio even more top end heavy.
Since you’re running old(er), pretty basic equipment, turn 50uS pre-emphasis on in your audio processor at the studio & make sure it’s turned off in the microwave STL & transmitter & don’t de-emphasise it on the MPX output in the processor or anywhere else, that will help the signal all the way from the studio output to the listeners receiver & their radio can de-emphasise the 50uS & it’ll sound much better & as it should.
You might find you have to alter the audio processor settings though, if it sounds good now you’ve processed the sound around the wrong pre-emphasis & high audio frequency levels, so you’re bass & mids will be too much when you change it to the correct way to do things.
The reflected power is pretty high for 300 Watts forward out too, essentially you’re only pushing 249W or slightly less up to the antenna, the rest is coming back unwanted & wasted, fix that & you’ll get better coverage for the power output too, at TXA Sydney, we’re looking for issues if we get 200W reflected for 20kW forward power, we do have a couple of transmitters running 50W reflected for 7.8kW forward, that we aren’t too concerned with though.
I’m actually surprised the transmitter isn’t shutting down on VSWR Foldback/Shutback alarms running that level of reflected power as you have a VSWR of 2.41:1
5 Likes
We are currently transmitting at a power of 3kw ERP full power is 5kw we need some work on our tower being a rural station we are fairly basic we have to rely on a lot of grants to keep us on air, hoping on starting a program soon all my music is in ac3 format with 5.1 surround sound & from what I’ve heard not all FM transmitters support this. Normally music is WAVE or FLAC hoping that I don’t have to reconvert my music files to FLAC as I will need a bigger hard drive because I have over 20,400 tracks.
Especially went out to the transmitter site as I have a friend who has never seen inside a radio station so It was like a virtual tour for her.
3 Likes
Transmitters don’t care what format the music is in, they don’t play anything in audio formats, they use MPX, Analogue L & R (which is just normal analogue audio, the same thing your Hi-Fi sends to the speakers attached to it), Digital Audio (usually either AES or uncompressed Linear PCM), for audio inputs, some will have built in mp3 player for backup audio.
Your issue will be what the play-out software will play & looking at your photos that’s Jazler which may or may not play AC3 audio, in any case it’ll be converted back to stereo, FM radio doesn’t do 5.1 audio, AC3 & 5.1 audio is a digital format, FM radio is analogue.
Not sure why you put all your music in AC3 & 5.1 Surround Sound, you’ve made the files bigger than needed & used heaps more storage space for your library for no gain & I’d say at least 95% of your music wouldn’t have been recorded & released in 5.1 surround sound anyway.
5.1 surround sound uses 6 channels of audio, yes it’s used in movies, etc. but rarely in music alone, some Classical Orchestral music is in 5.1 Surround Sound though, so you’ve made your files roughly 3 times larger than needed.
I get what your thinking was, but you’ve actually made your music library lower quality sound, than if you’d have done it in WAVE - CD quality - Stereo in the first place.
The best quality & option to record a “digital” music library is in WAVE format, next best if you’re limited in space & need a compressed library is FLAC, there’s better quality compressed CODEC’s but not all players can play them.
WAVE at CD Quality is the digital audio format all music is released to Radio stations from the record companies at, (with mp3 as an option), how do I know, my personal music library is made up from audio taken out of 2 major Australian Radio Network music libraries (with permission) & I’m on all the record company music release distribution lists.
You’ll most likely find if you’re converting your library back to WAVE or FLAC from the AC3 files, you’ll use probably 2/3 less storage space if you make it CD quality, but also note that AC3 is a lossy format, so even if you convert back to WAVE at CD quality in stereo, it still won’t sound as good as if you ripped/recorded it in WAVE in the first place, as you’ve already lost some of the original data/information out of the audio using the lossy CODEC of AC3.
10 Likes
Looking at connecting my laptop to the studio & using Playit which does support ac3 due to my poor vision I wouldn’t be able to see the screens & such small text which the station has on their computers, At the moment I’m using ac3 due to disk space but I’m looking at getting a bigger hard drive In the not to distant future so I can convert to FLAC.
6 Likes
Nine is the last network still to digitise the vast bulk of their Archives. The rest of the networks have already done so. The ABC still has some content to digitise, whereas Seven, SBS, and what little TEN saved has mostly been digitised.
7 Likes