Ken Redmond had been reading the latest reports on solar activity from Astronomy when Juss Forsythe came in, letting him know that there was a problem at the station. “From the sound of it, there’s a problem in the mixing board. When Spencer Dawes was trying to use the intro to his next number as a bed for the final announcements he needed to read, it was coming through almost unintelligible.”
Ken set down the tablet with the files Dr. Doorne had sent over. “That is not a good sign.”
It didn’t help that they’d had to jury-rig a lot of the equipment for the station. IT had been able to do a lot of it with software, but there had been some things which simply had to be fabricated as physical objects — and some significant parts of the mixing boards fell into that category.
At least they did have the remote setup to fall back on, so it wasn’t like they couldn’t keep broadcasting. But it couldn’t provide the same level of finished, professional sound during announcements. The microphones weren’t up to the same level, and there wasn’t the capacity to layer voice over a soundbed. When you were doing a location broadcast, the roughness added a sense of authenticity, of immediacy. Ken remembered listening to broadcasts from the Persimmon Festival over in Mitchell when he was growing up, and how the hint of crowd noise in the background really made the broadcast.
But for a routine studio show, it would make everything sound sloppy. Not so much the music sets, such as the one that was winding up as he and Juss entered the station offices. But as soon as Spence came on to do station identification and announce the next set of songs, that rough, crackly feel made it sound like some kid running an Internet radio station off a laptop in the bedroom. You halfway expected to hear a parental voice yelling about bedtime.
As soon as Spence was finished and the music was playing again, Ken slipped past the remote setup to take a look at their studio mixing board. “Now our big problem is figuring out whether this is hardware or software.”
Juss pulled out his phone. “I’ve already called Lou and he’s coming down.”
Ken recalled that Lou Corlin worked down at IT, and did a lot of troubleshooting. “Good.”
All the same, there was no use waiting for him to show up. Might as well get a multimeter and start checking the circuitry. Given how they’d put it together, and how much use it had seen in the past several years, there was always the possibility that a connection had worked loose somewhere.