Party Vibe

@cheeseweasel 701843 wrote:

If you’re selling, £2000+ does seem a bit optimistic to me. Unfortunately, demand for big analogue desks (with their heavy power supplies, cumbersome snakes and racks of outboard gear) has seriously gone down over the last few years, and they don’t sell for much nowadays.

analogue desks remain popular with smaller community broadcasters but even they lack the staff or expertise to maintain a decent one. and a production / FOH mixer usually lacks the control circuits broadcasters want (such as speaker mute when mics are up; remote starts, telephone hybrids etc); the cheaper production mixers are ending up in a lot of smaller stations simply due to the skills shortage (its not rocket science to get an old (1980s) era broadcast desk working well; but it seems few folk below age 40 know how to use a soldering iron, multimeter and scope these days (apart from maybe some Dutch and German youth; who end up with EELA and D&R desks in their bedrooms for a few hundred euros (these things cost as much as a small VW or Audi when new) – broadcast desks do have less channels and look bulky but make sense when you think how they are used.

As for strange things ending up in well used desks I’ve got this video titled “er rammelde iets in onze mengtafel” (“there was something rattling in our mixer”) where the engineer or a Dutch community broadcaster removes one of those “lucky bug” type things that a nervous presenter had somehow knocked into the inside of the desk (presumably when they were operating it with missing blanking plates). One thing you do notice on second hand radio desks is a notch in the faders for headphones and LS monitor output where years of nervous presenters with shaking hands have been holding onto the controls too strongly and worn away the tracks.

@DaftFader 701920 wrote:

We’ve probably got all the bits to go with it somewhere … we’ve got an entire banks media center that’s been donated to us. There’s tens of thousands of pounds worth of gear there. I’ll be fucked if I ever manage to figure out what it all does this side of Christmas, so I’m just going on rough prices I can find when diging about online as to what to sell it all at, I’m running it past a few people first, like you fine selves here, before hand just to make sure I’m in the right ball park, but there’s things like 8 way split monitor switchboards for recording TV (I assume they use them for making adverts or something, or mby they ripped them out of their security monitoring room, fuck knows lol).

a bank today would be more likely to upgrade its security systems and sacrifice something like the media centre; most CCTV is still analogue as todays CCTV cameras are as good as broadcast cameras of 15 years ago (I look after a few CCTV systems for work).

this media centre is or was a common fixture in many large corporate offices and it would indeed be used for monitoring TV news and recording it as well as making videos which got handed out free to TV stations to fill up airtime. It probably got set up in the mid 2000s before the economic crash when the banks and other corporates thought they could directly “own the media”

Except there isn’t much demand for non impartial programmes about banks; and such programmes really aren’t going to be very interesting; someone has had the sense to realise that by donating the equipment to your community project they can write off the failed project as a tax loss and gain more positive spin than making programmes no one is going to watch or trust (and they can get their employees or “deniable contractors” to spy on the internet from home or buy info from BBC Caversham like everyone else does).

A lot of this kit is just after the time I finished in broadcast engineering but it is essentially the same stuff I worked with crammed into smaller boxes and sold at a price point which was more amenable to non-creative industries who wanted to dabble in spin doctoring than the premium charged for “pro/broadcast” equipment; which TBH really isn’t much different from “consumer” stuff nowadays if there is any difference left at all. So feel free to post up any info on what it is (or send it to me via PM) if you are unsure or want it identified; I used to work on all sorts of obscure things (some of which appear to be still in use today by some TV channels).

Some of this equipment may be worth keeping and using for this youth media centre depending on how much space you have (I know this can be a problem as I had to help shift a entire community radio station in a week at the end of 2012 and they may well move again in the next few years).