• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Death of an audio console live on the air

He feels so bad,maybe he'll man up and pay for it! No drinks were ever allowed in control rooms when i did major market radio for this very reason!
 
An evening guy about four or five years ago at 98 Rock was fired for dumping some liquid into their console. What is it about air talent that can't understand that if your going to have liquid in the control room, put it out of spill range of the console? If I build one from scratch, I try to always have a small area behind or to the side of them to put that kind of crap, a ways away from the console. I'm sad to hear that very nice console has been treated like this. I wonder how the jock would feel if we went out to his nice car and dumped a big bottle of Coke on the dashboard, display, steering wheel, and foorboards of his car?
 
In a local market up here, a fellow years back dumped a full Slushee on top of a one-week-old Harris Medalist. Fluid rained down through the cue speaker and onto the relays and those power transistors on the right side of the back-board. By all accounts, it smelled like a dead body in that studio for a couple weeks. The jock supposedly paid for the console via payroll deduction...ostensibly for many years...
-D
 
Red wine does nasty things to components and PCB tracks, and requires faders to be stripped right down and completely cleaned out.
When the station concerned doesn't have a 'Studio B', it results in them being off the air for several hours while the work is undertaken.
I know this first-hand after being called out at 2am by a very sheepish jock who didn't know why they were off the air. Yeah, right.
 
Some spills do not kill for a long time.
Dried coffee with cream and sugar will destroy fine circuit board traces over a period of year.
I have seen boards that never suffered from the orignal spillage stop working when the
traces mysteriously seem to vaporize slowly with time.
 
While I was lucky in the facilities I engineered I heard of a local station where the morning man proceeded to drown a BMX console with orange juice. While it may do a body good I doubt it did the same for the console.

In a project studio I'm building I'm planning on building a "drink station" with cup holders meant to keep beverages away from the console.
 
Get a phone call about 1pm, "the board is making a buzzing sound". I ask, "did you shut it down?" The answer is "no". I tell them to quickly shut it down, I'll be there in 10 minutes.

Arrive at the station and smell coffee mixed with burnt electronics. The newsman who was in the studio swore it wasn't him, but he was the only one using that studio at that time. Mind you, this was the main on air studio, which was live from 6-10am and 2-7pm. He was recording wrap-arounds during the talk show which originated from a different studio. I find the coffee soaked napkins in the garbage can under some news stories. He still swears he didn't do it. I then go into the newsroom to talk to him and he has one of those giant Dunkin Donuts coffee cups sitting on the shelf behind him half full of coffee!!!!! STILL claims he didn't do it. There was more smoke coming out of me than the board at that point.

Pop the modules out of the board, which was a BE Mixtrack 90. The output modules had some fried op-amps in them, no big deal, they're socketed. BUT.... look at the motherboard, and the traces are burned through from the reaction of coffee, sugar and electricity. Luckily I had a spare parts board in the basement, but it was still 2 days on the backup studio while I tore it apart to get the motherboard out. Oh yeah, the ribbon cables were toast too. BE actually had some on hand, even though they no longer support consoles. I was ready to roll my own ribbon cable out of multipair. Have you ever tried to replace a motherboard on one of those???? Requires taking a LOT apart.

They didn't fire the guy. I would have. Not for doing it, but for denying it when it was so obvious and having the nerve to sit there with his giant Dunkin coffee vat. If he had told someone IMMEDIATELY after it happened, not let it sit for 2 hours, it could have been shut down right away and wiped up. The cover up cost the company two days of labor and major inconvenience with all the shows coming out of the talk studio... not exactly equipped for a live assist drive time show with news/weather/traffic all live and off the ISDN.
 
Ahhh, the Mixtrack 90! Only BE book that was thicker were for their cart machines.

Morning show spilled a moca into the right side. They were off for 2 hours befroe their engineer got it going.

Move ahead 5 years, it's moved to a new studio and have time to completly tear it down & refurb it. Found more edge connectors & tracing that was covered in moca and were about ready to go bye-bye. Plus it still had a sickly sour milk & coffee smell to it.
 
They have a video of the engineer showing the console damage. Looks like just a couple of damaged backplane boards, probably only a few hundred bucks worth of damage.

http://98online.com/pages/2012spill.aspx
 
Look at the DUST and GRIME in there!!!!!! Holy crap!!

That's why it's good to send everyone to the backup studio for half a day and clean things out. The coffee was bad, but all that dirt doesn't help either. Heat builds up, connectors get dirty... yikes.
 
You can't even smoke in most buildings, never mind a studio.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom