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VDC Supplies Cables for Kiss FM’s New Studios
UK cable specialist VDC Trading has supplied the cable and connectors needed to install three new studios at EMAP Radio’s Mappin House in London.
The new studios, which are now up and running, are being used to provide on-air facilities for the Kiss services across London and nationally on DTT, Sky and DAB. The Kiss network shows, which originate in London, also come from these studios.
EMAP Radio's national director of engineering, Alex Lakey, says the studios were installed as a replacement for facilities that were built seven years ago when Kiss moved to Mappin House from its old base on Holloway Road.
“After seven years of abuse by Kiss DJ’s, the mixers were well past their sell-by-date and the original installation had been modified too many times,” he explains. “We also needed to add extra facilities when the Kiss brand was extended into the former Vibe FM sites in Bristol and Bury St Edmunds. Building new studios gave us a great opportunity to refresh the look of the facility and bring our rooms up to date.”
The project involved taking two of the rooms back to their original structure so that new fabric and lighting could be installed, along with new furniture, wiring, equipment, mixer surfaces and mounting systems for the numerous LCD monitors. Any remaining serviceable equipment was reinstalled before a thorough testing process was undertaken. The third studio was also a total rebuild, but it involved adding significantly to the racks room systems so that EMAP could replace an old Studer desk with the same Logitek digital router and mixers that it is using elsewhere.
“We managed to achieve all this in just seven days for each room, starting at 9.01am on a Monday and finishing in time for the breakfast show the following Monday,” Lakey adds. “The third room actually took only five days to complete because by that stage practice had made perfect and we were getting very good at it.”
All three studios were designed and installed by the EMAP technical team, with additional help from the UK Logitek distributor Preco and Knotty Ash Woodworking, which manufactured the furniture to Alex Lakey’s design. In recent years VDC has been EMAP’s cable supplier of choice because it offers such a wide range of rugged and reliable products and can deliver in a very short time frame.
“For these studios, we purchased new connectors and cable from VDC, which also supplies the majority of our ad hoc cabling and connector requirements. In the three years I have been with EMAP, we have now replaced over 90% of the original cable infrastructure, in total now about 30km,” Lakey adds.
EMAP’s Mappin House is the base for Kiss and Magic and the national Digital services Q, Heat and Mojo. It is also the distribution point for Smash Hits, The Hits and Kerrang to Freeview, Sky and DAB nationally. Plans are now underway to redevelop three more studios, this time for Magic FM, which will allow EMAP to be much more flexible in the way it broadcasts these stations and which platforms it broadcast to.
9th March 2007
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