reported
by: Dr. Roland K C Tan
Secretary (Term
1995/96)
On a bright beautiful Saturday
morning at 10am, 18 May 1996, a group of 8 audio
enthusiasts including AES members and guests visited the Caldecott
Broadcast Centre at Andrew Road, Singapore. It was also a very special
day for the radio company as they were celebrating 60 sound years in radio!
The radio company, at the pinnacle of Singapore's radio industry, is none
other than the Radio Corporation of Singapore, affectionately known
to the listeners as RCS. With 10 domestic and 3 international radio stations
under its administration, RCS hails as the premier radio broadcaster in
Singapore, operating and managing one of the largest radio networks in this
region.
|
Asaad Bagharib,
Vice-President (Engineering) of RCS (fifth from left) with members and
guests at the Caldecott Broadcast Centre -
photograph by Ms. Rosita Ahmad. |
Kindly hosted by Mr. Asaad
S. Bagharib, Vice-President (Engineering) of RCS, he first gave an
overview of the Engineering Department's organisation structure and then a
brief discussion of the technical operation of RCS. Bagharib revealed, and
to the visitors' delight, the radio company's future development plan to
provide Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) in-country service by the year
1999. Listeners would then be able to enjoy music radio transmission with CD
sound quality without multi-path interference using mobile receivers. There
are also plans for a satellite DAB service in the next millennium.
The tour began with a visit to the
Air Studio Block. Here, storage of programme materials is fully automated on
harddisks based on the Digital Commercial System (DCS). CD players are also
in used for non-automated operation if required. Next, the visitors
proceeded to the Master Control Room (MCR) which is also the nerve center.
This is the place where all programme signals from the studios have to go
through before transmission. Though analogue routing is currently still in
used here, it will soon be replaced by a system that allows full digital
routing capability.
|
Asaad Bagharib,
Vice-President (Engineering) of RCS giving an overview of the
Engineering department's organisation structure and then a brief
discussion of the technical operation of RCS -
photograph by Dr. Roland K C Tan. |
At the Recording Room,
visitors saw the new digital logger called the RCS tracker. Comprising
mainly of 3 GB harddisk drives, these are fast replacing the older
analogue logger that makes use of the open-reel tape recorders.
The APTX-100 data compression
technology is incorporated here to substantially reduce the high
bit-rate associated with digital audio data before storage. |
Over at the Digital Audio Suite
(DAS), visitors were informed how commercial programmes are produced with
the aid of state-of-the-art industry standard digital audio workstation
comprising of the DigiDesign® Pro Tools II software installed on a Mac
machine. Commercial programme materials are sampled at 44.1 kHz and then
stored in Magneto Optic Devices (MOD) with 16-bits resolution. Throughout
the entire morning, Bagharib have been surrounded with many
challenging questions. One such questions raised concerns the unequal
loudness level between commercial programmes and the main programmes.
| The
final tour ended at about 12.30pm after a refreshing tea-break provided
by the host.
The Singapore Section would
like to thank the staff of RCS, in particular, Mr. A.S. Bagharib, Mr.
J. Jacob (Section Committee Member), and Ms. R. Ahmad (RCS
Public Relation Officer) for their kind invitation and generosity. |
During visit to
the RCS, DJ Kang Nee, from Air Symphony Studio (FM 92.4) chats with
section members and guests - photograph by
Dr. Roland K C Tan. |
|
