Turn up the radio

Mix and route the audio
Through channels on the board
And if you’re running in the mud
Your pot can’t be ignored.

If I had been under the impression that I would only see Dr. Propel on Tuesdays and Thursdays then I was sadly mistaken. I would not escape the zany humor of the Introduction to Broadcasting instructor on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays because those were the days I was required to attend Communication 105.04, officially known as Radio Workshop on the class schedule, and best known to us students as “lab.”

The good thing about this “class” was that soon after the semester started Dr. Propel announced that for a majority of the semester we only had to come to lab one day a week. Each of his four sections of COM 105 was divided into three and the students reported to one of the first-floor production rooms on our designated day. The word “Friday” is scrawled in a freshman hand upon my syllabus so I assume that was my chosen day. That actually worked out okay with Dr. Varvas’ history class not convening on Fridays.

These labs pretty much ran congruent with what we were discussing in our class; if the class were discussing the audio console (or board) then chances were good that our next lab would consist of some hands-on practice with the console.

Sadly, there were a lot of people in the lab and that I met over the next few years who found operating the board a daunting task. I think they were frightened off by the perceived complexity and convinced they were going to break something if they pushed the wrong button or something. Hardly. In fact, the consoles in the smaller practice production rooms were about as complex as the rooms themselves, which were more like small closets with barely enough room for two people let alone the equipment. Inside, and wired into the board, were a microphone, reel-to-reel machine, a cartridge machine, a turntable, and a CD player. All the good stuff.

One of the first things we learned about the board was its function: to mix, to route, and to amplify. Mixing seemed the obvious concept, what with the various inputs that the board operator could mix together (such as voice and music). The key thing to know was that each signal could be controlled separately to prevent, in this case, the music from drowning out the announcer.

Routing allowed the board operator to determine the path of the signal: was the signal sent out over the air (as it was in the main studio) or was it sent into a cue channel, which let the operator hear the audio source but without going over the air. The signal could also be turned off or on.

Amplification is the boosting of the audio signal to a broadcast-quality level. For example, the signal from a turntable is too low to broadcast over the air and therefore the board operator must use the console to amplify that medium’s signal.

Controlling the volume of each signal on the board – the mic, the turntable, the CD player, etc. – was a potentiometer, or pot. My notes indicate it was officially called a variable resistor but in layman’s terms it was nothing more than something to control the volume. All the older model consoles we had when I started had pots that were round knobs that the user rotated; newer model consoles had bars that performed the same function when raised vertically (these were mostly called ‘slide faders’ but were none the less potentiometers of the first order).

Part of Propel’s shtick was his frequent use of the word potentiometer in lessons and in quizzes. One of our earliest quizzes – proceeded with the direction to “take out...two...sheets...of pay-pah” – started off with the instruction to “spell potentiometer.” For the rest of the semester most pop quizzes involved the potentiometer.

I never knew Propel’s reasons for making us memorize the spelling and definition of the component but it obviously worked:

P-O-T-E-N-T-I-O-M-E-T-E-R

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Turn Up the Radio
(L.A. Greene & Roger Scott Craig)
Harlan Cage
From the album Double Medication Tuesday
1998