San Francisco’s KQED Public Radio (88.5 FM) just purchased Studer’s new OnAir 500 Modulo. Chosen for the station’s Sacramento bureau, the modular digital mixing console is expected to be installed and operational by the end of November.
With five larger OnAir 2000 desks already in use at the company’s headquarters, KQED is not a stranger to the Studer brand. One of the OnAir 2000s currently serves as the station’s on-air desk, while the other four are set up in production studios that have recently been renovated as part of KQED’s ongoing conversion to an all-digital format.
“We standardized on the OnAir 2000s for all of our production rooms and the on-air room so that our operators could very efficiently move between any of those environments without a learning curve,” says KQED Public Radio director of engineering Dan Mansergh. “In the year-and-a-half that we’ve had them, we’ve found them to be sonically very nice and extremely reliable.”
When the time came to transform KQED’s Sacramento bureau from a small reporter base into a mid-sized production facility for bureau chief John Myers and region reporter Jason Margolis, Mansergh again turned to Studer’s OnAir range.
“While out at NAB earlier this year, I was told that a modular version of the OnAir 500 would shortly be available, which could provide us with a good number of inputs, nice amount of flexibility and enough channels to accommodate at least four studio microphones, several call-in lines and anything else that we might want to run through the board,” he says. “It looked to be an appropriate choice, and seeing that its operation would be similar in many respects to that of our OnAir 2000s, I was comfortable in specifying it.”
For more information, please go to the company’s Website at www.studer.ch.
