You can’t be a professional football player without throwing around a few Wilson footballs.
In fact, the footballs that have passed from one NFL great to another have come out of Wilson’s Ada, Ohio, factory, where they’re stitched inside out, steamed and laced to exact specifications, and inflated to 13 psi before being sent off to play the game.
If you’ve just joined the broadcast big leagues and have acquired your first LPFM construction permit, you can guess where we’re going with this. In almost all cases, it’s better to go with a professional broadcast console than to try to get a music store mixer to pass as one.
A professional broadcast board will give you logic buttons on each fader so you can stop and start sources. It’ll provide speaker muting that mutes monitor speakers when your mic is on, eliminating the possibility of feedback. A broadcast board will have a straightforward way to output programming to air and streaming at the same time, and a means for controlling an ON AIR tally light to alert others that you are currently on the air with a live mic. It won’t have too many controls that provide opportunities for your guest operators to do harm to your program. Nor will it require you or your weekend talent to have to figure out what bus assignment goes where.
It will give you a simple interface to the task at hand: broadcasting. Broadcast consoles are made to easily handle music from a PC and to cue up mics and listener calls, which is why the broadcast console is a much more intuitive work surface for most LPFMs.
On the other hand, sound reinforcement boards are made for live sound applications requiring lots of hands-on sound shaping of source feeds. With this come the many knobs and buttons for equalizing, filtering and mixing handfuls of feeds – all of which is going to cost in you complexity.