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MOUNTLAKE TERRACE, WASHINGTON - JULY 2008: Dan Patrick, former long-time anchor of ESPN's tremendously popular SportsCenter, is arguably the nation's most well-recognized contemporary sportscaster. After a controversial,
though by all accounts amicable, departure from ESPN, Patrick launched a
nationally syndicated radio show on Premiere Radio Networks (Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Coast to Coast AM).
The Dan Patrick Show reaches in excess of 110
affiliates, streams live from sportsillustrated.com, appears on XM Sports
Nation, and is otherwise accessible from just about any modern device with a
speaker or headphones! With so many ears listening, the cost of an aired
profanity would be tremendous, and the rigorous requirements of Premiere
require perfectly timed closures. For both these reasons, veteran studio
designer James Hibbard, president of Pacific Mobile Recorders, specified an
AirTools 6100 profanity delay in his design and construction of Patrick's
East Coast studio.
Integrated into Patrick's network Operations Center, the studio relies on a
fairly standard air signal chain. For starters, four AKG C4500B-BC mics feed
as many Symetrix 528E Voice Processors. (Hibbard has installed 528Es in
literally hundreds of studios around the country because he loves their
consistently warm sound, as well as their unobtrusive expansion and
compression.)
The control room uses a Wheatstone/AudioArts D-75 console for mixing the mic
processors and all show elements including bumper music, sound effects and
phones. Everything is routed through a Vorsis HD-P3 audio processor and then
on to the AirTools 6100 Broadcast Audio Delay, which is the final link
before heading out to the network. An RCS/Prophet Systems NexGen Digital
communicates with the 6100 via a DB-25 connector to produce the four
closures necessary to keep the affiliates in perfect synch. "In my
experience, the AirTools 6100 is the easiest profanity delay to set up,"
said 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 near six or seven seconds,
The Dan Patrick Show uses a whopping forty seconds of delay. "With so much
liability on the line and so many affiliates," Hibbard explained, "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
ten-second increments. You press it once, you dump ten seconds; press it
again; you dump twenty seconds, and so on up to forty. 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!"
Although no longer riding the ESPN leviathan, Patrick's fame and affable
character have his new radio show among the top-ranked in the nation. Thanks
to Pacific Mobile Recorders and the AirTools 6100, no impromptu cussing can
tarnish that success.
