International Radio Festival: the ultimate studio

On the island nation of Malta, the ninth annual ‘International Radio Festival’ has just wrapped up a week of immersion in the business of broadcasting, production & air talent, primarily focused on music-based radio.  Marguerite Clark writes about this in a recent edition of “Radio World” and also took the photo of this stunning state-of-the-art on-air remote broadcast studio.  The facility pictured allowed 30 different public & commercial broadcasters from throughout the world, to broadcast a “live remote” back to their respective stations at home.  Time using this studio was booked in blocks by individual broadcasters, and all went smoothly with no hiccups or glitches sending their IP-based audio feeds back to their own countries & stations.

Now THIS is my idea of a studio!  Multiple computers allow logging, software-based airplay selection plus access to the Internet for program enrichment & social media to engage listeners.  It included a separate sub-mixer with dual turntables allowing flexible on-air remixing & sampling, plus dual virtual CD/file players.  The studio’s output provided a digital connection for IP-based stream transmission to feed the ‘remote’ back to home stations.  Parallel analog outputs supplied input to a small in-house FM transmitter feeding the studio’s audio to various locations within the festival compound & adjacent grounds.

I’m already putting away pennies in my piggy bank to upgrade my home broadcast-production studio to this magnificent facility.  I’m already on my way to achieving this, as I immediately recognized the headphones as a model I own & use – the Audio-Technica  ATH-M50x, which I highly reccomend.  Other specs of this studio:  Axia Fusion digital audio console, Audio-Technica BP-40 hypercardioid mics, WinMedia‘s audio-playback suite shown on the middle screen, Tieline audio codecs, IP transmission devices by Axia & Tieline.

No drooling on the keyboard allowed!