Friday, April 20, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.
The product exposition at the National Association of Broadcasters convention is mostly about magic boxes.
This is not the broadcasters' fault, it's just that they need magic boxes in television and radio, and so, there they were on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Wednesday. Yes, there are satellite dishes for action news vans, telescoping camera booms, cameras and microphones, but mostly there are magic boxes.
For example, there are boxes that measure and regulate frequency and amplitude, boxes that add sound effects such as reverb and echo (sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!), boxes that keep commercials from sounding too loud (sunday, sunday, Sunday), boxes that store, boxes that play back, boxes that make weather graphics and boxes that put annoying scrolling text on the bottom of the screen.
And then there's Nick Rose's box, which keeps people from swearing on the radio, particularly on those call-in talk radio shows where intelligent people calmly discuss the issues of the day and calmly suggest that their opponents are dog-descended Hitler-huggers who are destroying America. (That stuff is fine. It's only when they swear that there's a problem.)
Rose's Eventide Inc. makes what used to be called a tape-delay box (no tape these days, though), which allows radio stations to broadcast almost live with the signal going out several seconds after the words are spoken.
If you've heard a radio jock ask a caller to turn down his radio, it's because the program is using a delayed signal - his words will come out of the radio maybe a minute after he has spoken them, which can be confusing for many radio callers, not to mention listeners.
The delay gives a radio engineer a chance to cut out obscenities by building up a bank of radio time that can be borrowed against. The three most important buttons on a delay box are "Sneeze," "Dump" and "Panic."
The sneeze button is for when the radio host is going to cough, sneeze or chew out an intern. When the host knows he's going to do that, he signals the engineer, who holds down "Sneeze" and while that button is pressed, nothing said goes into the delay bank. Anything said after the button is released sounds to listeners as if it immediately follows what was said before the button was pressed, and there are now X fewer seconds in the delay bank.
The dump button is like a retroactive sneeze button. Say a caller, at minute 5:00 of a broadcast, says a two-second-long swear word. It will take the engineer two seconds to hear it and a second to recognize it and press the dump button at 5:03. The dump button will then remove the last three seconds fed into the delay bank and for listeners 5:04 will follow 5:00 without a break.
But all of this dumping and sneezing is taking time out of the delay bank. If someone swears a lot, and all in a row, the engineer is going to have to hit the panic button. The panic button will play a recorded jingle while the delay bank refills in real time.
Eventide's top-of-the-line, $3,500 model can have up to 80 seconds of delay time, Rose says. Why that much? Can't you just hang up on a bad caller?
"Usually, if it looks like it will go on for that long, they'll cut the caller off," Rose says. "But sometimes they like to leave the caller on and abuse them for being a bad person."
Product: Ride of mini Valkyries
A remote-controlled, 35-pound helicopter with a swiveling high-definition camera, an eight-horsepower jet turbine engine and a flying time of 45 minutes, offered by RF Central for the low, low show price of $85,000.
Being that it's a heavy object laden with jet fuel and spinning blades, designer and cameraman Gary Travis carries $2.5 million in liability insurance on his own 'copter and says he tries not to fly it where it might crash onto someone. Canada, usually.
Usually, he films wildlife documentaries, music videos and real estate advertisements.
In a twist, the Utah-based Travis is hoping for federal regulation of unmanned aerial vehicles such as his. For one, it would mean less legal confusion when he tries to get police permission to fly one (Canada already regulates his flights). And, secondly, it would keep hobbyists and other less savory types from flying UAVs willy-nilly around American cities.
"I mean, let's take one of these over to Afghanistan, sell it, teach those guys how to fly it," Travis says. "Think that's a good idea?"
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