Article: Broadcasting from Home

By Mike Brown Community Information 0 Comments

During the COVID pandemic broadcasting from home became a new, but temporary normal, but it has left a legacy. Presenter Mike Brown explains why.

As both a sound engineer and a radio presenter I thought it was high time I documented my unusual and possibly unique triple-purpose home studio which provides for three work flows:

1. Digital editing and CD mastering to Philips Red Book standards producing high-resolution master or DDP (disc description protocol) image filesets.
2. Creation of pre-recorded radio shows during which all music remains in the digital domain.
3. Creation of live radio shows which are the linked digitally to my local, community radio station which itself is all-digital as far as its FM transmission processor.

I have been interested in radio for as long as I can remember and as I am now completing my 70th journey around the sun my interest goes all the way back to before Radio Caroline ushered in the brief era when the offshore pirate stations ruled the waves. When I left university there were very few opportunities to work in radio - only the BBC, in fact, as ILR (Independent Local Radio) was still a few months away from becoming reality - and none came my way so I ended up working in recording studios where I had a wonderfully varied career, and kept radio as my hobby which, on retrospect, was probably the right thing to do.

After retiring I started to concentrated more on my radio hobby and began adapting my home mastering setup so that I could comfortably do both mastering and radio production work. Not long after that he COVID pandemic acted as the catalyst to turn what had started off as a bit of a lash-up into something rather more capable. CHBN's radio studios are in the main Truro hospital which greatly restricted their operations. Presenters suddenly found themselves unable to use the station’s regular studios as Infection Control strongly discouraged access so we had to find ways to broadcast from home. My own home setup lent itself fairly easily to this and has now evolved into a very capable facility.

This is how my studio looked in 2021;

And this is how it looks in 2025:

Pre-recorded programmes are compiled digitally (at high resolution 32-bit depth) within my main computer using Adobe Audition, and after being rendered to stereo and saved as a lossless FLAC file they are transferred to the main studios by FTP before loading into the studio playout system (which is also fully digital) for broadcast. So, for online listeners the music in my pre-recorded programmes stays digital all the way through the chain until is finally decoded to analogue by the listener's player.

For FM listeners our our transmitter is fed by the analogue output of a dedicated Broadcast Bionics xNode D-A convertor.

Live programmes are produced quite differently. At the heart of it is a relatively cheap but very cheerful mixer, the Behringer X1622USB, which has 4 mono mic/line inputs and 4 stereo line inputs. It has other, less obvious attributes too, which have become essential to the way my studio works.

Although a Pioneer PD-S705 stable platter CD player is available most music is ripped losslessly to FLAC using Poikosoft EZ-CD Audio Convertor HD and stored centrally on a Synology DS218play NAS (network attached storage). It’s then played out from the NAS using Mixx software from a dedicated PC feeding a Roland Octa-Capture USB sound card. (This is actually overkill but the Octa became available to me after the hospital studios were upgraded to all-digital operation.)

Jingles are played out from a tablet with a touch-sensitive screen through Playit Cartwall software into a Behringer UMC202HD sound card .

My main presenter mic is an MXL 990 chosen because I think it suits my voice well. This is then fed to the mixer via a dbx 286S mic pre-amp and processor.

I can also take phone calls into the studio using a digital 'virtual' line which is is converted to analogue by a Linksys PAP2T VOIP adaptor and fed to the mixer via a Sonifex HY-03 hybrid TBU (telephone balancing unit).

(Bizarrely the PAP2T is no longer sold or supported by Cisco, and is becoming a little more difficult to find, and yet they are sill in demand. This Voice7 VOIP device is a more current alternative.)

These, then, are the sources I work with to create a live programme. So what happens next?

The main stereo output of the mixer is fed digitally into a dedicated ‘Link’ PC. This runs Sonobus software which provides a high quality, low-latency two-way link to-and-from our studios.

A complete live programme ultimately consists of audio created here at home combined with other audio (jingles, promos, news bulletins etc.) from the station's main studios, so a reverse clean-feed of all audio sourced within the station's studios is fed back to me here at home. The Behringer then mixes this reverse clean feed into my headphones. this means I can hear all the audio comprising the complete programme.

The Link PC also runs an excellent software emulation of BBC PPM level meters – specifically the Darkwood Designs Quad PPM which simultaneously displays the levels of the left and right channels being sent from here, along with the derived sum-and-difference components.

Finally, the link PC also displays an accurate real-time clock which is synced to the National Physical Laboratory’s atomic clock reference via NTP (network time protocol).

Last, but by no means least, my main PC is used to remotely access the computers within the station’s studios so that I can get myself connected through to the station’s output and control the station’s playout system to include the news, informercials, ads, promos and so on.

At this stage you may be wondering why? Why not just go into the studios and do the programme from there? Well, partly I enjoy the challenge and the achievement of broadcasting from home but partly, again, COVID may have been the catalyst here. It has left me with a condition which limits how much I can do physically. I do still go to the studios once a week for technical and training sessions in order to carry out routine maintenance and to train new and fellow presenters, but the more I can do from home the easier it is for me. And the truth is I have created this home studio to suit the way I work and, like a favourite car, it’s just enjoyable to drive and I like the results I can get from it.

Crucially, for me and my listeners, the audio quality hardly suffers at all. Sonobus allows me to optimise the bit rates of the Opus streams used for the links, and it’s all stereo of course, so the programmes sound good whether they’re heard on FM or online.

And that's how it's done!

If you want to listen to the station, CHBN offers four alternative online streams:

An adaptive stereo HLS stream encoded using AAC encoding
A standard stereo AAC stream, also at 160 kbit/s
A standard stereo Ogg Vorbis stream at 128 kbit/s
A mono mp3 stream at 64 kbit/s

The stream addresses are

There is minimal audio processing on these streams so, unusually these days, what online listeners hear is very similar to what is actually being created in the studios.

Listen Live to CHBN Radio

CHBN always aims to provide an alternative to the mainstream stations. As well as providing a range of local information and health/well-being items CHBN also offers a wide variety of music including specialist music programmes which currently cover the following genres: Oldies (including 60s/70s, and 80s), Country, Musicals and Shows, and Classical. We also run a sustaining service of relaxing new-age and instrumental music overnight, which we call Soft, Soothing Sounds.

Recently, along with five of our neighbouring stations, CHBN took part in the first Cornwall Community Radio Day, and our contribution to the day can be heard on our Listen Again service at Mixcloud. It showcases some of the station's best speech output of recent months.

CHBN Radio | CHBN - programme schedule | CHBN - other ways to listen

Author

Mike Brown

Article: Broadcasting from Home