Technology: Robot Radio

Clive Glover takes us on a tour of the digital studio

If you haven't visited your local Our Price, Virgin, HMV or even Woolworths lately, you may be in for a shock when you do. The little silver discs have been taking over the 'record' departments at an amazing speed. Many shops now confine the vinyl albums to a small corner, while CDs and cassettes fill up wall after wall. Once reason is that shops make about £4 profit on each full price CD they sell, compared with about £1.50 on an album.

But the main reason for the success of the CD is undoubtedly that they sound better than vinyl albums. Although some hi-fi buffs will tell you (probably correctly) that a good turntable can still produce better sound quality than most CD players, they are talking about spending rather more on a turntable than most people spend on their entire system.

There seems little doubt that CDs will eventually take over completely. CD sales in the UK have gone from zero to probably 40 million this year, compared with 50-55 million albums. Next year more CDs will be sold and, within 2 or 3 years, a lot of material will only be available on CD...

The digital revolution

The popularity of CDs is already having a considerable effect on existing radio stations, influencing both technical and programming plans. And CD is only the start of the Digital Revolution in radio: just over the horizon are digital audio tape (DAT), hard disc storage systems, digital mixing consoles... even completely digital studios.

Further delays in setting up the new Radio Authority could mean that the 'hundreds' of new stations promised by the Government will not begin to appear until 1992/3 (although they'll probably have radio stations on Mars first!). By that time, building a studio round record turntables and cartridge machines will probably seem as odd as including a 78 rpm gramophone would today.

Quality loss

So, what are the advantages (or disadvantages?) of using CDs in a radio studio? The main advantage has to be their sound quality and the lack of crackles and pops which even the best presenters and stations cannot avoid sometimes when playing records. However, some of the quality is lost in transmission as the technical standards applied to FM radio reduce the bandwidth of the signal to below that reproduced by a CD. Although virtually all stations now 'process' their final signal to make up for this limitation, the final sound coming out of your speakers will be inferior to playing the same CD at home. I hope it goes without saying that it is pointless to play CDs on AM radio!

The major disadvantage of CDs from the point of view of the DJ is that, until recently, there has been little, if any, 'professional' hardware to play them on. Stations have therefore had to use CD players in the studio which, unlike record and tape decks, little different from domestic ones. This has caused considerable difficulties for DJs in selecting and cueing up tracks and headaches for the engineering staff because of the poor reliability of the equipment compared with that in the rest of the studio. After a short period of fascination with these new toys, many DJs have given up using these 'user unfriendly' machines and gone back to good old black vinyl.

However, a new 'Second Generation' of professional CD players has recently started to emerge. Typical is the Studer / Philips A727 Pro CD Player. Apart from being a more solid and reliable machine than earlier models, it has lots of features designed specifically for the professional radio studio. These include a very accurate cueing system and an automatic disc recognising system for up to 100 discs, so it could remember which tracks are on the current playlist.

CD Jukebox

But apart from the technical implications of CDs, the combination of these new professional CD players and new software will soon have a dramatic effect on the programming of many FM stations. The combination of a number of professional multiplay CD machines (such as the Sony CDK006, which can handle 6 discs) and appropriate control software produces a `CD Jukebox'. Such a system typically uses 15-20 players and so gives direct access via a computer terminal to up to 1,500 tracks! Clever software allows the system to be programmed to select tracks from various playlists and it can operate automatically for, say, overnight shifts — or even several days on end! Station idents, commercials (or even DJ announcements) can be pre-recorded on DAT and inserted at the appropriate time by the computer. So much for live radio!

The only station in the UK using this system at the moment is Radio Nova International, profiled elsewhere. No doubt, others will follow soon.

In the next part of this series of three, we look at Digital Audio Tape, before moving onto the all-digital studio in the final part.