Radio TechCon 2024 confronts thorny issues

Image: Rupert Brun

LONDON — This year’s Radio TechCon, the annual conference for the United Kingdom’s radio engineers and technologists, took place on Monday, Nov. 25, at the Savoy Place headquarters of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in London. Sessions covered a wide range of subjects, from traditional technology and the move towards new media to more social issues such as modern slavery and gender bias in speech-to-text systems.

Anne Locker, library and archive manager of the IET, spoke about the centenary of women in communications. Image: Rupert Brun

The day began marking 100 years since the Electrical Association for Women was founded to promote the use of electricity in the home to women and educate them about the technology itself. Anne Locker, library and archive manager of the IET, observed that “there have always been women engineers” while noting that, currently, only 15.7 percent of broadcast engineers are women. Encouragingly, a significant proportion of attendees and speakers at Radio TechCon 2024 were women.

In introducing the next session, conference host David Lloyd commented that “everyone has been moving into new premises” over the last year. Bauer Media Group and the BBC were among those. Bauer moved its high-profile radio brands, including Greatest Hits Radio and Magic, from its long-time studio center in Soho into new purpose-built facilities at The Lantern building in the Euston area of London.

Mark Farrington, broadcast systems manager at Bauer Media, explained that the “clear objective” in designing the new broadcast center was to have “flexible spaces” and to future-proof all the facilities. “It is fully audio over IP,” he said, “partly because we didn’t want to run multicore cables through the offices of the other tenants in The Lantern. We’ve also ensured that, for example, a presenter from GHR can go into a Magic studio and, with the press of a button, turn it into their own space, with the technical set-up and branding.”

The BBC’s big move

Similar considerations were behind the design of new studios within BBC Broadcasting House to accommodate Radios 2 and 6Music, which moved from nearby Wogan House (formerly Western House). Radio TechCon dedicated two sessions were dedicated to this project. The first looked at how virtual reality was used to pre-visualize the designs for the studio spaces, while the second covered the build and technical installation.

Spencer Marsden, an R&D engineer working with the BBC’s Blue Room consumer technology facility and Thadeous Matthews, a technical operator at BBC Media Operations, outlined how 3D technologies, including MetaQuest 2, Unreal Engine 5 and Blender, were used to map out the studio areas. This was to ensure, among other things, that the on-air console was in the correct position and that there were good lines of sight for the presenter, guests and video cameras.

Dave Walters, principal solution lead for audio production at BBC Technology & Media Operations, outlined the construction of four studio boxes. Important considerations included accessibility, providing USB-C connections to allow presenters to bring their own devices and a choice of touchscreens or tactile buttons for control. Solution lead for audio production Jamie Laundon added that everything runs on an AES67 network, including the Dante Domain Manager and Controller. PTP (precision time protocol) is an essential but difficult element to accommodate (as it was for Bauer).

What about sustainability?

Radio-oriented companies have been dealing with the move towards net zero for some time, which was discussed by Andy Land, global head of sustainability at audio group Focusrite, and Dan McQuillin, managing director of Broadcast Bionics. Because of the several brand operations within Focusrite, Land said it took three to four years to get momentum going to meet the various standards for reducing carbon footprints, including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme and the Science-Based Targets Initiative. “Net zero will only work when everyone gets on to it,” Land commented.

Hend ElGhazaly, a PhD student in the Speech and Hearing group at the University of Sheffield’s School of Computer Science, spoke on gender bias in speech-to-text programs. Image: Rupert Brun

McQuillin pointed out that Broadcast Bionics does not have a full-time person concentrating on sustainability. “We are a small software company, but we have big customers, so there is a big downstream impact,” he said. Carbon savings can be made through virtualizing a product and on material and energy use.” He concluded that as the conference theatre was full of problem solvers, everyone should “roll up their sleeves and get to work” on this issue.

Sustainability and purpose expert Dr Astrid Leuba prefaced her presentation, ‘Modern Slavery and the Media Industry,’ with the emotional story of how her father had been sent from his family and forced to work for a local farmer due to circumstances in France after the war. She said this hurt his later life, particularly in how he viewed his self-worth and expectations. “Slavery comes from poverty,” she said, highlighting that forced labor today can be found in many aspects of modern life, including the cleaning, fishing, care and baking sectors. She advised people to be aware of their own impact, recommending Slavery Footprint as a guide for companies to see if they were unwittingly employing people being exploited in this way.

Meet the transmission adjudicator

There are many more ways listeners can receive radio programs today, but terrestrial transmission remains a significant part of the picture. In ‘What Has the Transmission Adjudicator Ever Done for Us?,’ the Transmission Adjudicator himself, Glyn Jones, explained how the Office of the Adjudicator-Broadcast Transmission Services came into being and what it does. It was established after one of the two U.K. radio/TV transmitter providers — Arqiva — bought the other — National Grid Wireless — in 2007. Jones explained that to counter any adverse effects of this perceived monopoly, Arqiva signed up to ‘The Undertakings‘ to protect competitive markets and provide a 17 percent discount for broadcasters. “My role is to talk to the customers about what bothers them and check that The Undertakings work,” he said.

With 16 percent of radio listening now through smart speakers and Alexa being the main product, broadcasters must ensure they are on this platform. But, as Jamie Woods, lead software engineer for Broadcast.Radio, observed in her session ‘Amazon Alexa Skills: State of the Union,’ this is not straightforward because coding skills have been necessary to get stations on these devices, which could exclude smaller broadcasters. To facilitate this, Amazon has introduced a non-code kit, which Woods said was intended to guarantee the presence of terrestrial radio stations.

Broadcasters, particularly those with large-scale distribution requirements, are now looking at new media alternatives to traditional transmission. With its international reach, BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) moved its 28 radio channels and TV broadcasts to the BT Vena cloud-based platform this year. The presentation ‘BFBS – Transmission in the Clouds’ outlined how the organization considered moving to an IP-based networked cloud platform away from the previous satellite uplink and hardware approach. Broadcast engineer Vanessa Tarrier acknowledged that “a lot of testing” had been involved in preparing for the transition. In contrast, principal engineer Mark Edgar said a significant challenge was “reducing the impact on the audience.”

Another recent component in radio listening is mobile streaming, but, as Andrew Murphy, lead research engineer at BBC R&D, and Simon Elliot, senior distribution manager with BBC Distribution, outlined, assessing whether the networks and our smartphones can deliver an excellent live broadcast experience is not easy. An adapted version of the BBC Sounds app was used to measure reception on two different mobile networks covering west London, with 20 people listening while walking, driving or cycling. For predicting performance, Elliot said signal strength “isn’t the full story,” while Murphy commented that sometimes the system worked and sometimes didn’t. “We conclude that mobile streaming is complex with many variables,” he said. “The next steps will be to look at the server side of live streaming.”

In fond remembrance

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be divisive and controversial, but insufficient thought has been given to inherent bias in how it is trained. This was the basis of the ‘Making Speech-to-Text Fair’ presentation by Hend ElGhazaly, a PhD student in the Speech and Hearing group at the University of Sheffield’s School of Computer Science. After working with the leading speech-to-text programs, including Kaldi and Whisper AI, ElGhazaly noticed a gender bias, usually against women, in the automatic speech recognition process. “It depends on what group the AI was trained on,” she said, adding that the problem was now being addressed through schemes such as Meta’s Fair-speech Dataset.

Radio TechCon paid tribute to two prominent broadcast engineers who died this year. Image: Rupert Brun

The afternoon sessions rounded off with examinations of two very different audio technologies. Sound designer and engineer Yasemin Kahveci described how she created the Sound Bath installation for this year’s BBC Proms using EMF pick-ups as part of the recording process and an 8.1 immersive audio system for playback. In contrast, audio consultant Rupert Brun returned 100 years to celebrate the time signal known affectionately and universally as ‘The Pips’. As he noted, this key part of many radio broadcasts may not have become such a British institution under its original nicknames of ticks and dots. (A newspaper coined ‘pips’ in 1929, apparently.)

The now traditional Quiz at the End rounded off a well-attended and wide-ranging day of discussion. The event began and ended with tributes to two well-known radio figures: former News UK engineer Chris Thame and Bruce Davidson, broadcast and technology director at Bauer Media, who oversaw the move to The Lantern. Both of them died this year.

The author trained as a radio journalist and worked for British Forces Broadcasting Services Radio as a technical operator, producer and presenter before moving into magazine writing during the late 1980s. He recently returned to radio through his involvement in an online station where he lives on the south coast of England.