WHEN REALITY STRIKES

“It was time. The VistaMax all comes down to one box. If something goes bad, it’s bad, whereas WheatNet is a distributed architecture. Blades can be anything and anywhere. If a Blade goes down, there’s always another Blade to take its place,” he explained. 

Hubbard radio studios in nine major U.S. markets are predominantly WheatNet IP audio networked. (Click to WTOP Showcase Studios for a video tour of Hubbard’s top billing D.C. station.)  

Hubbard’s studio facility in West Palm Beach joined the ranks in June with its new WheatNet IP audio networked studio for 97.9 WRMF featuring an LXE AoIP console set in Studio Technology furniture. 

Dave designed one showcase studio for WRMF from two smaller studios and gave it visual appeal, as well as camera automation through the WheatNet IP audio network. Rob Goldberg and the RadioDNA crew stepped in and brought the idea to fruition, he said. “We’re now able to do so much more with cameras and lighting. Sometimes it feels like I’m back in television,” commented Dave, who has engineered for radio and television in his more than 40 years in the industry. 

Hubbard stations are heavily live and local; the Hubbard cluster serving West Palm and South Florida, has at least five live shows going on daily for its New Country 103.1 (WIRK), Urban AC X102.3 (WMBX), News Talk 850 (WFTL), Greatest Hits 107.9 (WEAT), and top-rated Hot AC 97.9 (WRMF), plus a variety of talk and live updates for Sports 640 (WMEN).

Flexibility is the key. “For the WRMF studio, because the morning show likes the console right-to-left and the afternoon show likes it left-to-right, we run presets that flip the console around. We also have a third preset for voicetracking. Anything can be anything with this console,” said Dave.

The new showcase studio went live in June, followed by an open house. Other studios are soon to follow, combining live as well as voicetrack operation, which will be built in place over time. Once completed, the facility will be a fully integrated AoIP networked studio environment with LXE, Glass LXE and virtual interfaces created using ScreenBuilder tools.

For the new WRMF studio, Dave insisted on new, modern equipment. Bringing back any of the older gear “would just be asking for another single point of failure,” he said.  

WRMF’s new showcase studio has HD cameras that hook into WheatNet to bring audio into the video mixing system provided by InsoftUSA (HDVMixer). “24 CAT6 cables, and the studio was done. We used to run bundles of cables,” said Dave, adding that the old VistaMax system still runs on Windows XP.

“I really began to put my trust in Wheatstone years ago when I worked across the street and we had A6000s. Those consoles were never obsolete. I could send a module back to North Carolina, and it was refurbished and sent back,” he commented.