Radio Station Equipment: On-Air Mixing Board

Video Transcript

"And welcome back to Valley Free Radio! First, the board, let's take a look at the board. So the board is where all the inputs come together and get mixed into your final broadcast signal. So important things that you need to know about the board, the basic thing is, I'm going to activate one of the inputs, a CD player. So the board is broken up into channels, each of these columns here is one channel. For each channel you need to select which input you're going to use, is the input that you want to be broadcasting. So, for example, this one, this channel here has two inputs, it could be, this switch is nothing actually, or this one which is a CD player. So first select the correct input, in this case the CD Number 2, if you want to broadcast it turn it on and turn up your input. When you see levels, watch your levels, you know you're broadcasting. For us, we've determined that we need to have our music pretty much maxing out at vertical, other stations, they max out in the red. If you go past that you will have clipping, which clipping is when you're broadcasting something too loud and the downstream components can't handle it. So check your levels, always be watching your levels. Now we're broadcasting from CD 2, that's good. Okay, so how do you turn that off? On our board, our ancient Ward-Beck systems board, the way you turn it off is not by pressing the "on" button again, that results in nothing. You turn it off by pressing the "off" button and that can be pretty confusing. So again here's the channel, select the input that you want to that channel, turn the channel on by using the "on" button and turn the channel off using "off" button, and there's on again, always watch your levels, and change your levels with this slider."