Metropol

Anyone wanting to recreate the BBC World Service in their bedroom might find this interesting, http://www.go-dove.com/event-16010?lcid ... aign=16010 their auctioning off all their old kit...

Might be of interest to some..

Yay @ the "backward" faders - up for off and down for open.

Is this based on the commonly held notion that if a presenter falls asleep and slumps forward, they close their mic in the process - or was there another reason?

Could those faders be easily converted they work the opposite way?

What would you expect that lot to go far?

Gavin Scott wrote:Yay @ the "backward" faders - up for off and down for open.

Is this based on the commonly held notion that if a presenter falls asleep and slumps forward, they close their mic in the process - or was there another reason?

Sort of, it was deemed that if you move forward and knock a fader then if you open by fading up you could mistakenly open your mic or play audio. Whereas having the faders in the reverse means that if you knock them then your mic/audio just dips a little bit.

There's plenty of other reasons floating around such as they were designed to work like light switches through to it was a BBC engineers' personal preference. Most BBC studios now have "commercial radio" desks where a fader channel is opened by pushing away.

Very odd!I can't imagine a fader that goes the opposite way. The again, I suppose its just habit isn't it, to expect it to go up to fade.

wells wrote:Could those faders be easily converted they work the opposite way?

Depending on how much slack there is in the wiring at the back, yes. The fader part itself (forgive me, I forget the name - its been a while) is a replaceable part, so you could unscrew it and turn it round.

What would you expect that lot to go far?

Are they not separate lots? You could get yourself a great mic.

All early commercial radio was pull to open as well. It's only more recently that push to open has become more of the norm.

I much prefer pull to open, especially if the fader goes up to +10db. You put your thumb knuckle on the little screw and pull the fader down to your thumb tip with your middle finger. The fader then rests on the 0db point.

The beauty of that operation is that you can do it totally by feel, while you're using your eyes to check the PPM or look for the lost record or cart.

That, supposedly, is why they call it "driving the desk", because once you're used to a desk you don't need to look at what you're doing; a bit like not looking down at the gear lever when you change gear in a car.

Annoyingly I can't find it now, but there is/was a set of videos on YouTube showing behind the scenes at a local radio Children in Need show, being produced with their Mark III desks, with pull faders.

From these it's clear that a big advantage of this style of desk is how quickly you can pull a fader completely open. This means that for carts and the like with fader start the presenter/operator could just flick the fader open, starting the audio.