[cma-l] Broadcast desks

[tlr at gairloch.co.uk]

Whoops, I seriusly undersold the D&R there! Thanks to Ian Hickling for pointing out I had accidentally given you Euro prices as Pounds. Actually you can get a 12-channel loaded Airlab with telco hybrids for not much more than £4,000. Seriously good value for money. And as someone else mentioned,Ian can give you lots of other information!

Bruce is right that doubling up channels isn't always easy for inxperienced users - I wouldn't do it for routine use, but it's very handy indeed for specialised or production engineering work. For example, we have back room gear such as off-air recorder PC, off-air tuner, and other rack equipment connected to secondary inputs easy use without tying up a channel permanently. Also the secondary line input circuit on the telco channels is ideal for connecting an external codec or hybrid that sensibly comes up on a telco channel and needs a mix-minus feed.

One other thing I forgot to mention that's handy is that the Airlab stores desk switching and monitoring configurations on a smartcard (like a chip & pin card), so if you lose the config during maintenance or fiddling by volunteers, you can reset it all in a flash(!) from a removable card. You can also program the desk from a PC and save config there, but using the cards is quicker.

Alex