KFI Radio Live Remote: How is it done these days?

[sdwulfdawg]

I was listening to KFI's live remote today from a pub in Lancaster. I was really impressed at the super duper sound quality throughout. I also was quite impressed how they had some really good coordination with their board op at the mothership. How is internal talkback to the station achieved?

So here comes my total lack of knowledge: how is the signal from the floor of the pub get to the station? Satellite? Internet Comrex unit? Microwave?

Enquiring minds want to know!

 

[K.M. Richards]

A couple of smartphones. One takes the Comrex feed to the station (using 5G if available, but 4G LTE works very well too) and the other is used for talkback/cueing/etc.

 

[ragazzo-pazzo]

So here comes my total lack of knowledge: how is the signal from the floor of the pub get to the station? Satellite? Internet Comrex unit? Microwave?

There are a number of possibilities. Comrex using Cellular data as KM suggests is just one possibility. Others include CleanFeed, ipDTL, LuciLive, Telos Z/IP etc. At the end of the day the audio (both directions) is most certainly making its way across the internet.

 

[xmtrland]

Internet now days with a Comrex or Tieline both provide a bi-directional link and both have phone apps that work well. Since it's bi-directional you only need one phone or tablet. You can easily plug a Focusrite USB interface into an android or iPhone. LuciLite works with Comrex.

I know of an afternoon host that uses an iPad with the tieline app, focusrite interface and RE27nd.

I find the PC based options like ipDTL frustrating because of windows.

 

[sdwulfdawg]

Thank you for the responses.... I'm really showing my age that I remember when using AT&T phone lines was the thing for live remotes. Again, I was really impressed on the great sound.... At least I guess I'm not that technologically inept that I was thinking Comrex and internet.....

 

[henry]

I've been out of radio just 4-5 years now. And even back around 2011, I remember telling guests (not KFI, different station) to "use a land line" because the sound quality was better.

Getting a Comrex seemed life-changing. Nowadays, yeah, I'm sure there's some great cell-based stuff.

 

[Greg Strickland]

As already said, Internet based codec remote broadcast connection is bi-directional. Essentially everyone has Interruptible foldback (IFB), which means when the console operator back at the station presses the Talkback button, talent at the remote hears the console operator in one ear.

Both paths can be stereo, which may not be necessary for the audio to be broadcast, but it can be another audio path to use for something. For example, it is normal to send mono mix-minus audio of the program line back to the remote, with talkback on one channel only. This way guests at the remote do not have to hear talkback, and it provides a clean feed that can be mixed at the remote site (with the local mics) for a crowd PA. No one hears board op talkback unless they need to.

Additionally, Internet applications can add video and text communication between the console operator and remote talent.
Today's devices also have bi-directional contact closure capability that could be used for tally lights and buttons for remote talent to use to fire off something.

All of the above is routine, done by many engineers at countless remotes. And no doubt some other things.

This is all made possible by the Internet, and the massive tailwind provided by insatiable consumer appetite for high-speed (broadband) Internet access.

Broadband Internet is an incredible thing for all things audio. More than ever, listeners have great audio quality available at their fingertips, and on the go. This audience has a choice, and the good news is radio has an equal audio playing field on the Internet.

 

[Mikey Radio]

All of the above is routine, done by many engineers at countless remotes. And no doubt some other things.

At one station I was at, the manager actually rejected a lot of the newer technologies that were available even long after they were well accepted as industry standard. He wasn't necessarily afraid of newer ideas and having to learn new ways of doing things - rather, his reasoning was because he felt that a "remote broadcast" should sound like one. Meaning, if the jocks or talk hosts - whomever were doing a full-length talk show broadcast or even just a few breaks per hour from an auto dealership, he felt listeners should be able to tell they were not in the studio and that they were somewhere in "the field". He preferred the sound of the remotes over a POTS line or analog cell interface vs. newer technologies that allow those at remote locations to sound and even operate the same as if they were "back at the station" operating in their usual studios.

That said, once Covid hit and a lot of folks in radio and TV were forced to broadcast remotely, it's a very good thing all that newer tech existed and had long been perfected. I can't imagine listeners to a talk program or a morning show that was known for a lot of in-studio banter listening for long if everyone forced to work from their "home studios" throughout the pandemic was on a TELCO line or analog-sounding cell connections.

 

[K.M. Richards]

That said, once Covid hit and a lot of folks in radio and TV were forced to broadcast remotely, it's a very good thing all that newer tech existed and had long been perfected. I can't imagine listeners to a talk program or a morning show that was known for a lot of in-studio banter listening for long if everyone forced to work from their "home studios" throughout the pandemic was on a TELCO line or analog-sounding cell connections.

Although it's something akin to a "what if ...?" question, I would bet that if there wasn't the new tech available the telcos would have shifted into high gear to install suddenly-in-demand ISDN circuits at those home studios. The late Charlie Tuna had that at his residence for many years, even after broadband took off.

 

[Mikey Radio]

Although it's something akin to a "what if ...?" question, I would bet that if there wasn't the new tech available the telcos would have shifted into high gear to install suddenly-in-demand ISDN circuits at those home studios. The late Charlie Tuna had that at his residence for many years, even after broadband took off.

Curious if anyone here knows what ISDN cost on average in 2020 - 2022? According to one site, I saw an "installation cost of several hundred $$ and ongoing costs of about $60/month". Considering how many AM stations especially are on their knees financially, I'm wondering how many would've just gone satellite/automated 24/7 or even gone dark rather than bear the costs of their hosts and/or some staff getting ISDN lines at home?

 

[PTBoardOp94]

In the 90s, ISDN wasn't that much more expensive than a standard telephone line.
But because of other, better services now exist, many telcos don't offer ISDN any longer.

 

[K.M. Richards]

AT&T stopped provisioning ISDN in the early 2000s and grandfathered existing circuits at that time. So I imagine the cost was already exceeding what they could charge without customers cancelling en masse.

 

[Deleted User]

Hello New England Telephone..... I need two 5KC loop lines from the Billerica Forum over to the WJUL studios on Feburary 21st... .... just use the normal pairs if you can do it....

ahhh the good old days

 

[K.M. Richards]

Hello New England Telephone..... I need two 5KC loop lines from the Billerica Forum over to the WJUL studios on Feburary 21st... .... just use the normal pairs if you can do it....

ahhh the good old days

Not to mention always having a card on the control room wall with the direct number to the CO and the pair idents for all the "permanent" loops, like the network, the loops to the local churches for Sunday morning, etc.

 

[BarryATL]

Hello Southern Bell. Is this Ivy St? Good. This is WKRP in Dallas. Please switch our interexchange circuit from MRN (Motor Racing Network) to the UGA Football Game. We go live in a few minutes. I realize they only gave you 15 minutes between broadcasts to make the switch. I wish we had two interexchange circuits but the Bell engineers says there are no more interexchange circuits available between Dallas GA and downtown Atlanta.

Yes. The days when you could talk to real people who actually could walk over to a patch panel and solve an issue.

 

[Delete My Account]

The amazing thing is that, for the average cell phone caller (on stations that still take their calls) the audio quality is so bad. Despite all the advancements in technology, callers actually sound worse.

 

[davideduardo]

The amazing thing is that, for the average cell phone caller (on stations that still take their calls) the audio quality is so bad. Despite all the advancements in technology, callers actually sound worse.

In most cases, there is a simple explanation: Most calls now are made from cellular phones. When you combine digital cellular audio with the station's own digital system you usually get dueling codecs and it sounds like....

 

[PTBoardOp94]

Cellular audio is actually better than landline quality today. A few years ago, the major carriers began supporting "VoLTE" or Voice over LTE, which allowed them to greatly improve the audio. It's not quite in the same room quality, but it is noticeably better.

However, landlines were analog, and VoLTE is digital, which does open the possibility of dueling codecs. Furthermore, when a VoLTE user places a call to a traditional land line, the phone company will convert it to analog, and they may do that poorly.

 

[sdwulfdawg]

As already said, Internet based codec remote broadcast connection is bi-directional. Essentially everyone has Interruptible foldback (IFB), which means when the console operator back at the station presses the Talkback button, talent at the remote hears the console operator in one ear.

Both paths can be stereo, which may not be necessary for the audio to be broadcast, but it can be another audio path to use for something. For example, it is normal to send mono mix-minus audio of the program line back to the remote, with talkback on one channel only. This way guests at the remote do not have to hear talkback, and it provides a clean feed that can be mixed at the remote site (with the local mics) for a crowd PA. No one hears board op talkback unless they need to.

Additionally, Internet applications can add video and text communication between the console operator and remote talent.
Today's devices also have bi-directional contact closure capability that could be used for tally lights and buttons for remote talent to use to fire off something.

All of the above is routine, done by many engineers at countless remotes. And no doubt some other things.

This is all made possible by the Internet, and the massive tailwind provided by insatiable consumer appetite for high-speed (broadband) Internet access.

Broadband Internet is an incredible thing for all things audio. More than ever, listeners have great audio quality available at their fingertips, and on the go. This audience has a choice, and the good news is radio has an equal audio playing field on the Internet.

NICE POST, THANK YOU!

 

[yeoldeschool]

Cellular audio is actually better than landline quality today. A few years ago, the major carriers began supporting "VoLTE" or Voice over LTE, which allowed them to greatly improve the audio. It's not quite in the same room quality, but it is noticeably better.

However, landlines were analog, and VoLTE is digital, which does open the possibility of dueling codecs. Furthermore, when a VoLTE user places a call to a traditional land line, the phone company will convert it to analog, and they may do that poorly.

If it's not too late to respond to this thread:

* VoLTE is just a proprietary VoIP protocol agreed upon by several cellular carriers, one that has an "HD" (>4 kHz) audio bandwidth. You only hear the added quality when making mobile to mobile calls because the global SS7 PSTN landline telephone network isn't capable of passing anything over 4 kHz with voice calls. So when you call a non-mobile number (like a radio station's call-in lines) from a VoLTE capable cellular device and carrier, the extra fidelity is lowpassed off. I have always wondered why a famous equipment maker like Telos doesn't figure out a way to make a radio call-in system that runs off cellular so the extra fidelity of these calls can actually be heard on-air. Imagine some box that sits in the board op's booth that's connected via coax to a cellular antenna up on the station's roof. Combined with some kind of switching/forwarding service that operated at the provider level, calls from mobiles would come in over that box, while calls from listeners using regular landlines would come in through the station's normal lines.

* Landline isn't exactly analog. Only the "last mile" (the copper between the CO and you) is still analog. Everything else (between all the central offices) has been digital for decades (it began going digital in the 1970s). The digital format used throughout the SS7 PSTN is (I believe) G.711. And I know it's definitely lossless 8 kHz sampling at a 64 kbit/s bitrate, yielding exactly 4 kHz audio bandwidth maximum. Though in practice, most calls only get around 3.4 to 3.6 kHz due to most telephone company backbone trunk circuits (virtual digital circuits anyway) using "robbed-bit signaling." Bit robbing also lowers their maximum bitrate to 56 kbit/s, which is why we topped out at 56k modems back in the day. (Bit-robbing wasn't done on ISDN circuits, which is why ISDN modems were 64 kbit/s -- or multiples of that, when bonded.) Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed-bit_signaling if you're bored. It also has a nice explanation of where that mysterious, ultra-faint 1333 Hz tone a lot of board ops dealing with callers sometimes heard depending on which circuits their calls traversed, and probably had no clue about the origins of.

* The reason old-style non-VoLTE digital cellular audio sucked (specifically: sounded like crunchy, garbled water being modulated to impersonate human speech) was/is because it used/uses codecs like AMR at astonishingly low bitrates (as low as ~4 kbit/s). The lower the bitrate, the worse it sounded, and from one call/moment to the next, the bitrate would be decided on by each caller's cellular provider based on a combination of factors ranging from network-wide policy to congestion levels at each particular tower. Anyway, you can actually use the well-known open source tool FFmpeg to convert WAV files to AMR and back in order to re-create that exact "classic digital cellphone sound" on a PC. Just google the Windows static binary build of ffmpeg.exe (no installation necessary, you just plop it in a folder and run it at the cmd line), and run it first with this command:

ffmpeg -i input_file_here.wav -ar 8000 -ab 5.9k intermediate_file_here.amr

Followed by this command:

ffmpeg -i intermediate_file_here.amr output_file_here.wav

Replace "5.9k" with your choice of 4.75k, 5.15k, 5.90k, 6.70k, 7.40k, 7.95k, 10.20k, or 12.20k, depending on how bad/good you want the "call" to sound. Great way to torture your friend the radio talk show host, sending him spoken birthday greetings in WAV files or whatever, run through the codec that was every radio personality's mortal enemy. ;-)

Considering the bitrates involved, it is actually amazing AMR manages to produce semi-intelligible speech at all.