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| The Quinte Broadcasting Company | |||||||||||||||||||
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| By Ben MacMurchy, April 3, 2004 | |||||||||||||||||||
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| The Morton Building, at 10 South Front Street, on Belleville's waterfront. Quinte Broadcasting occupies the top floor of this four-floor office building, constructed in 1985 by who else but the Morton family, the owners of Quinte Broadcasting and former owners of the local cable system (now part of Cogeco) as well as the daily newspaper, The Intelligencer (now part of the Osprey Media Group). One year ago this month, I participated in an internship at Quinte Broadcasting, as an overnight and evening announcer on all three stations: market leading Hot AC/CHR Mix 97 (CIGL-FM 97.1), heritage country/full service CJBQ (800), and soft AC CJTN (1270 Trenton, soon to become CJTN-FM 107.1). | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Here's where it all happens: the Mix 97 control room, complete with a spectacular view of the Bay of Quinte, at least during the day. (I feel like a real estate agent describing these digs. :-)) All three stations use Ward-Beck consoles, and Broadcast Electronics' AudioVAULT (AV) system for digital audio storage & automation. On the Mix's three computers (L-R): Internet/e-mail, AVair, and the AV recorder. | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Next is the CJBQ control room, with the only WBS R1400 console in the building... all the other control rooms have R1200's. On the other side of the glass is the CJBQ talk studio, where Peter Thompson's top-rated "Open Line" show originates... you can see the "rolling studio" (mobile production workstation) in there, and beyond that, Mix's then-evening jock Joey Martin on the air. | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Some of the area's best spots, as voiced by Quinte Broadcasting announcers and produced by Mike Darrach, come from this studio. The announce booth is next door. Mike puts the spots together using Creamware's TripleDat before importing them into the AudioVAULT system. When John Brannen was production manager (he's been in sales since summer '02), the entire west wall of prod control (left side of the pic) was lined with his very large collection of different brands of macaroni & cheese, still in the original boxes, unopened and uncooked. | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Across from the Quinte Broadcasting newsroom is the CJTN control room. CJTN's programming operations moved to Belleville from Trenton in 1999, and a secondary production room became 'TN's control room, which is still used for some light production during automated dayparts. To put the board in prod mode, there is a switch that will put AVair directly on-air, as all hard drive and satellite audio is mixed down to one stereo channel before it goes to the board. Until fall 2002, CJTN was using an older DOS-based version of AudioVAULT, called CORE, but after CJTN ran its last Toronto Blue Jays telecast, the newest version of AV was put in, along with brand new Windows 2000 machines. CJBQ and CJTN both carry Broadcast News' hourly national newscasts in the evening & overnight hours. | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Engineering is next door to CJTN. Here are four of five racks in this room... off-air monitoring and FM remote control in the leftmost rack, followed by patch panels and distributon in rack #2, on-air processing and STLs in rack #3, and satellite & remote gear in rack #4. The fifth rack (to the right, not shown) holds some more processing gear, and what I think is a remote control computer. For processing, Mix 97 has that big Orban Optimod-FM 8200 in rack 3, CJBQ has a pair of Texar Audio Prisms ('BQ broadcasts in AM stereo, as you can see in the logo at the top of this page), and CJTN uses a Dorrough DAP-310. As for the older Optimod-FM 8000 on the right, I'm not sure if it's still in use... the meter's been stuck at 0 for as long as I can remember. The workbench is behind me, the punch blocks are behind the racks, and the AudioVAULT servers are in a separate computer room, beside Mix's CR. Last year's internship at Quinte Broadcasting was a blast, thanks to the following staff: Dan Mellon, Sean Kelly, Peter Thompson, Joey Martin, Steve Marlin, Justin Anderson, Rick Kevan, Matt Mitchell, Will Alexander, as well as fellow interns/classmates Mark "Pez" Pezzelato, Lee Cusick, Devon Jones, and Blair Stickle. Home |
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