At the risk of giving away my secret identity (ha ha), the Music Series has evolved in several ways over the years. The first year it started at Hill's, the radio sound was simply an aux feed off the main board, which was a 16 channel Mackie. It was a nightmare to mix because the engineer had to run out to the parking lot and listen to the radio, then run back in and tell the guy on the board to give it more bass or less guitar or whatever. That led to the the idea of using a split snake to send all of the audio to a second mixer inside the house to mix the radio feed separately which gave more control over the live radio sound. Over the next couple of years, more elements were brought in to make it more of a radio show then a live concert that just happened to be broadcast on the radio. There were even a couple of years recorded on a digital multitrack (which were never used and are still sitting on hard drives somewhere). As the series progressed, the shows became bigger and bigger and got farther away from the small mostly acoustic shows of the early years and it was harder and harder to mix the shows for the radio. Every mic on the stage picked up pretty much everything because of the cinder block lined stage and semi-enclosed venue (though the patio at Hill's is technically open air, the big oak trees and intimate design of the venue make it a lot like being at an indoor venue not to mention the loudness of the sound system). Many things were tried to improve the sound and sometimes the bands were on board and thought about doing a good on air performance and sometimes they really just didn't care about that and just wanted to do a typical live show for the crowd on hand. The growth in the last couple of years at Hill's pretty much made the move to the bigger Nutty Brown inevitable and this brought about changes in the sound and format of the show. The current system of taking a feed off the board and mixing it with ambient mics can work in a venue like Nutty Brown because of the open nature of the venue (it would never work well at Hill's). I can't say anything bad about the guy doing the mixing for the radio now. He is a good engineer who is, in the great Clear Channel tradition, doing it even though it's really not a part of his job and takes away from his other duties. Of course, I can't do this without giving cudos to Eric Raines and Chris Mossier who always go above and beyond in making the show work.
I hope you all keep listening to the Series which is a grand tradition that I am proud to have played a part in and I hope it survives the new direction of KVET and thrives for years to come.
