The decline in radio studio operational standards

When I was a lad in radio I was taught that your headphones were the most important tool you had. Not only would you hear if some audio was playing that shouldn’t be playing, or if something wasn’t playing that should be playing, but by actually ‘listening’ you could hear if your voice was too quiet compared to the music, or even if the music itself was too quiet or too loud, and so, back in the ‘manual adjustment’ days, you could adjust the volume level accordingly to ensure that the output of the desk was more or less running at the same ‘flat’ level.

I guess driving a desk in this way is a bit like driving a car. You don’t keep looking at the speedo to help you decide when to change gear, you listen to the engine. Yep, the meters are there to help you make fine adjustments or to ‘confirm’ what you already know from ‘listening’.

So, a while ago I was watching this video on Facebook (yes, I was on Facebook) which was showing a travel reporter presenting his travel bulletin. He is wearing headphones. The DJ/desk operator has control and is fading up his mic, etc., but for some reason accidentally fades up the wrong channel, effectively leaving the travel monkey’s mic off. However, the travel monkey just burbles away reading his script, unaware that he’s not going to air, until the DJ notices and gives him a cue to start again and opens his mic correctly this time.

Tony Blackburn knows how to ‘listen’ to himself

Now my point here is to ask what’s the point? As in why is the travel monkey wearing headphones if he can’t ‘hear’ that his mic isn’t on?

What is it that he can hear?  Why isn’t he ‘listening’ to what is going on (or, in this case, not going on) in his headphones?

Surely if he’s not going to take any audio cues from the lack of hearing his own voice in his cans he might just as well have not been wearing them. He’s rendered them completely redundant.

Is this really how radio people are trained (or not trained) in these modern times? It’s bad enough that nobody cares about getting levels right these days, thinking the processing will sort it all for them (and then they wonder why nobody can hear a word they are saying as they are drowned out by the music). It’s so bad sometimes that on the same station that this event occurred on, the old supposedly highly experienced afternoon drive-time presenter is quite often impossible to hear above the music.

Years ago part of the pride of putting a radio show together was to ‘listen’ to it as it is being created and make everything mix correctly along the way to produce a single ‘orchestra’ of sound, with a good DJ/engineer almost ‘playing’ the desk like an instrument whilst undertaking his role of ‘conductor’ to produce the finished masterpiece to delight the listeners’ ears. Not any more.

The presentation techniques are boring and dull and now it seems the technical techniques have all but gone. And the industry wonders why radio is no longer taken seriously by the general public? Jeez.