To avoid airing any profanity and to meet Premiere Radio Networks’ rigorous requirements for perfectly timed closures, veteran studio designer James Hibbard specified a Symetrix AirTools 6100 profanity delay in his design and construction of “The Dan Patrick Show” East Coast studio. “The Dan Patrick Show” is hosted by one of the nation’s most recognized contemporary sportscasters, is nationally syndicated on Premiere Radio Networks, reaches in excess of 110 affiliates, streams live from Sportsillustrated.com and appears on XM Sports Nation.
The show’s network operations center relies on a fairly standard air signal chain. Four AKG C4500B-BC mics feed individual Symetrix 528E Voice Processors, chosen for their warm sound and unobtrusive expansion and compression. Mixing for all elements is handled via Wheatstone/AudioArts D-75 console, with the output routed through a Vorsis HD-P3 audio processor. The final link before the signal goes out to the network is the AirTools 6100 Broadcast Audio Delay. An RCS/Prophet Systems NexGen Digital communicates with the 6100 via DB-25 connector to produce the four closures necessary to keep the affiliates in perfect synch.
Pacific Mobile Recorders specified the system. “In my experience, the AirTools 6100 is the easiest profanity delay to set up,” said President James Hibbard. “It fits in a single rack space, all of the controls and setup can be done from the front panel and the relays are simple, reliable dry contacts. Moreover, we can see that the closures are going down right on the front of the box, so there’s never any question or confusion about the state of the system.”
While most traditional profanity delays are set around six or seven seconds, “The Dan Patrick Show” uses a whopping 40 seconds of delay. “With so much liability on the line and so many affiliates,” Hibbard said, “missing a profanity would be catastrophic. The AirTools 6100 gives us the ability to select our own dump lengths. For Dan, we have it set up to dump in 10-second increments. You press it once, you dump 10 seconds; press it again, you dump 20 seconds — and so on up to 40. More importantly, after a dump, the 6100 makes up time between breaths so it’s perfectly transparent. The last thing we want is for Dan to sound like a chipmunk!”
For more information, visit www.symetrixaudio.com and www.airtoolsaudio.com.
