Developments in broadcast audio production

Modern broadcast audio production methods have a great legacy to live up to. For the last half a century broadcast audio has had a most useful production, transport and archiving system, analogue tape. Now that new technology has invaded the broadcast radio market, the author examines how digital audio systems have countered the in-built advantages of the old production format. The first digital audio workstations were well outside the budget of most radio productions. However, workstations such as SADiE are now common in the commercial and public sector and are used by producers and audio engineering specialists alike. Various methods have been devised to counter the immediacy of tape editing. Many systems are now able to load audio material onto the hard disk drive as a background operation. This allows pre-loading of material during the completion of a prior task or in more sophisticated editors the ability to start editing audio whilst still dubbing it into the machine. Some machines allow the use of audio compatible SCSI DAT drives which can upload audio at twice normal speed