The recording and distribution facilities of the
Farnham & Alton Talking Newspaper have gone through a number of changes over the past
10 years. In the early days we recorded directly to a master tape cassette and
utilised Graff equipment to copy the listener cassette tapes from the master.
In 2004 we converted to digital computer recording using 'Cool Edit' audio software and
used Telex Xgen cassette tape copiers and Telex EDAT software to create the tapes directly
from the recorded computer file.
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Studio Equipment Rack |
With the decline of cassette tapes
and the difficulty in getting the Telex equipment serviced we therefore decided in April
2007 to implement the change to CD. This was followed by the production of
recordings on USB memory sticks in April 2009.
The studio equipment rack shown right houses a headphone distribution amplifier,
cassette tape player, mini-disc player, CD player and a general control panel.
Initially we supplied
just the monthly magazine on CD to give our listeners time to get used to the new format.
We did not transfer the weekly news recordings to CD at that time because as we
where producing four news recordings each week it was decided that there was insufficient
time after each recording to supply weekly news recordings on both tape and CD.
In April 2008 the four weekly news recordings were finally transferred from tape to CD.
Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of a small percentage of listeners who did
not wish to change to CD. At the same time we introduced a computerised logging
system using a barcode scanner to record the issue and return of CD mailing wallets.
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CD Duplicator Units |
The CD duplicator units comprise two
1 to 10 duplicators and one 1 to 11 duplicator. The master CD is placed into the
first unit and copies from the first run are used as masters in the other two units.
The majority of the changes involved the re-training of the recording engineers. A
training period spread over three months was introduced before starting and comprehensive
operating manuals were compiled and issued to each engineer.
A period of training was also introduced for the production assistants covering the
duplication of CDs and the use of the new computerised barcode logging system. In
addition operating guides were supplied as individually laminated instruction sheets.
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