BPR’s Live Broadcast from Brevard Music Center June 24th

On June 24th, BPR offered our listeners a live broadcast of opening night from the Brevard Music Center (BMC). It was the first time a BMC opening night has ever been broadcast live, and the first live broadcast from BMC in over a decade. Led by BMC Resident Conductor Ken Lam, the program featured Mussorgsky’s showpiece “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Respighi’s tone poem “Fountains of Rome,” and guest artist, pianist Conrad Tao, performing Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” The Blue Ridge Public Radio broadcast was hosted by Anastasia Marie.

Preparation for Event 

The decision to go ahead with this live broadcast from the Brevard Music Center meant that BPR was able to make a (possibly long overdue) purchase of a Comrex BRIC-Link II and a Comrex Access NX. This is an IP codec, allowing the station to get live, studio-quality audio from remote locations. It can send high quality 2-way audio connection. In this instance, we only sent the audio from Brevard to the station. We intend to set up a 2-way connection for future broadcasts.

The BPR Tech Team permanently installed the Comrex BRIC-Link II unit at the station, and on our first test run, took the portable unit to Brevard Music Center. In future, this will allow BPR to go to a location and take audio either from a mixing board (as is the case at the Brevard Music Center) or use a microphone to do live reporting from the field.

Test run: more than a week out from the scheduled live broadcast date, the BRR Operations and Tech teams split up, 2 to Brevard and 2 at the station. The BPR team onsite in Brevard meet with staff from BMC, including their IT Manager and Audio Engineer. This trial run accomplished 3 main things:

• Setting up and testing network conditions for stable uninterrupted audio – checking delay.
• Setting up a webcam from the audio booth at BMC (suction cup and gaff tape), allowing us to stream video of the stage to the station, via a Zoom call.
• Level check to see how the live music level output played through the Comrex at the station.

The BPR team at Brevard also completed a side quest to record a promo with Mark Weinstein, the GM of Brevard Music Center. The audio was recorded on a Sony PCM-D10 Hi-Res Linear PCM-Recorder.

The test went smoothly. It was super fun meeting the Brevard staff face to face; the beginning of a relationship we hope to continue. Based on the success of this test, we expected no audio issues with the live broadcast.

Event 

By the time the house opened at 6:31pm on the night of the event, the BPR team was set up in the sound booth at the Brevard Music Center, with both audio and video feeds sending to the studio in Asheville.

AT 7pm, The BPR broadcast went live. At the station, Host Anastasia Marie aired prepared interviews and pieces from Conrad Tao’s albums, along with her live commentary of the scene in Brevard, supported by Director of Content, Catherine Comp, and members of the Tech and Ops Teams.

In Brevard, the BPR team headed down to the Maestro tent for refreshments before the show, and checked in at the BPR tent, where Morning Edition Host, Helen Chickering, Abby Bishop from Membership and Elise Mckinnon from Business Sponsorship greeted fans of the station stopping by to say hello.

The pre-show speech began just a few minutes late, not bad for live theatre! The BPR host let our radio listeners know what was happening on stage until the concert began.

Once the performance started, it was mostly a matter of monitoring levels and network connection for the rest of the broadcast. The team back at the station kept an eye on the Comrex dashboard to ensure that the delay between devices was high enough to catch and correct any audio artifacts before they went on air, while the team at BMC monitored the outgoing audio and sent back communications to the station (via a Zoom group chat) about show timing updates. The broadcast itself went very smoothly with no audio or connectivity issues. We got positive feedback from our listeners and overall considered the night a success.

Lessons Learned

No problems arose with the audio broadcast, but the video feed was somewhat blurry and overexposed, making it difficult for the host to identify who was walking on or off stage. Brevard Music Center actually records video of all their shows, and for the future, we intend to feed this higher quality video back to the station in place of our webcam setup.

We also want to utilize the two-way connection capabilities of the Comrex to send the station’s output back to the team on-site. The Brevard team only had access to the public livestream, which had a significant delay of about 40 seconds. With a direct live audio connection, the on-site team will be able to monitor the station audio as it happens.