Low cost remote stereo feed to FM station
Cohasset / Hippisley
cohasset@frontiernet.net
Sun May 6 10:07:29 EDT 2007
I've been away from the broadcast game for many years now, but have a
question that perhaps some of you can answer.
I am responsible for all high-tech stuff for my small local church here
in the West-Central Adirondacks. A big part of what we do involves
feeding our Sunday morning church service to a commercial AM/FM
operation for broadcast over both modes. The station is a locally owned
independent, some 30 miles away from us as the crow flies, perhaps 100
miles by road, and (thanks to the terrain in between) definitely not
line-of-sight for any existing towers.
We are in the process of internally upgrading the quality of our church
audio -- both for the weekly service and for various musical and
dramatic productions that are staged in our sanctuary -- from better mic
pickup for the choir, to archiving on CDs and DVDs instead of audio
cassettes (ugh!), to doing multichannel recording with post-production,
etc. However, one big problem that we face is how to get "decent" audio
shipped to the broadcast station in real time. Right now we're using a
standard POTS line to delivert our audio. The inherent dynamic range of
our weekly church service, coupled with the frequency rolloff of the
phone line and all the compression equipment at the far end of the line,
makes our audio pretty terrible by the time it reaches the home -- which
for most listeners is via the station's FM outlet.
I have been trying to figure out what a low-cost solution to sending
high fidelity stereo "sans" POTS hum and noise to the broadcast station
might be. So far, all I can come up with is approaching the station
management with the idea of the church sending left and right data
streams to them via the internet. But I'm not sure whether our current
DSL bandwidth is sufficient to do that reliably. Nor do I know how much
of a selling job I might have to do at the station end of things.
* Do any of you with current experience with or knowledge of remote
feeds of this nature have any suggested solutions?
* Can any of you comment on what a typical low-budget C&W format
station might have in its equipment inventory that would be relevant to
an inexpensive (for them and us) solution of this problem?
* Is today's typical small-market station set up to patch streaming
audio from the internet into the control board?
* *If* the internet is used for this kind of remote feed, what is
commonly accepted as the minimum acceptable bandwidth for the connection?
This is a small-town church and a small-town broadcast station.
"Low-cost" (for both) is the operative adjective.
Any suggestions, off the wall or otherwise, would be greatly appreciated.
Bud Hippisley
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