When the
BBC Overseas Service moved
into Bush House at the start of the Second World War, there was a
shortage of studio
mixing desks because of the sudden expansion. As a stop-gap
measure a number of 1938 vintage outside broadcast mixers -
the
OBA8 - were installed.
The BBC at that time made its equipment
last... these desks were still in use thirty years later
- I've made programmes on the wretched things, and I took the photo
above in
January 1969. The desk is much as it was when it was installed: the
outrigger panel on the extreme left was added in the late 1960s to
accomodate the tape machines which were then being installed in
studios. The small microphone over the mixer was added around that time
for the Studio Manager to make the short announcement which preceded
most transmissions (previously there had been a ribbon microphone slung
over the gramophones). The microphone in the studio is an ST&C
4038
ribbon - when the desk was first installed it would probably have been
the much larger AXBT ribbon microphone.
Although the main
amplifier (valves, of course) was very good and much quieter than many
later desk designs, the mixing was done at low level: that is, the
microphone outputs were fed straight into the mixing controls without
amplification, and the outputs of these controls mixed without the
use of buffer amplifiers. The result was that not only were the
controls very prone to noise when you moved them, but fading up one
channel lowered the level of anything else faded up at the time.
To
make working them more difficult, there was no transmission talkback,
to allow the Studio Manager to talk to the studio while recorded
inserts were being played. This led to considerable skills in mime as
instructions were passed back and forth. Try asking someone 'which tape
do you want next?' without being able to talk to them.
Starting
around 1969 these desks were finally removed and replaced with Bush
House's first transistorised desks, which brought their own set of
interesting problems - that's another story.
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