Anyone here done this for a corporate or broadcast environment? This is for a community radio station where there isn’t an extra producer to balance the levels of the guests, and the main presenter may well be sat away from the main console.

There are 3 mics, some odd condensor things like PC mics but slightly higher end. They have them big circular windshields before them, the station manager said that the guests sometimes forget to keep correct distance and the presence of these stops some of the popping. He did mention wanting to have tech ops like the old days but if the shows are TX’ing at office hours that means guys like me can’t always attend to do this. I didn’t get a chance yet to see how exactly they were connected to the main console (possibly all 3 via some local amp into a single line level channel!) but of course the different presenters have different voice volumes and sometimes if they are all talking at once or laughing the output (from a recorded audio stream) even distorts!

Also there are clunks and thumps from somewhere, either a mic is slowly coming adrift from its mountings (they are supposed to be isolated from people setting down scripts and other stuff on the talks studio table and poke through a hole in it) or someone is knocking into a windshield…

I think this has gone unnoticed because its hit the limiter on the TX chain but the recorded stream (for “listen again” and also ofcom logs) is raw (well I couldn’t see or hear any soundprocessing on it, which otherwise is a good thing as the station still has dynamic range). But the off air monitoring in the reception/traffic office is via a cheap ghetto blaster and I bet the cans have the politically correct limiter to protect the users’ ears so no one is hearing it..

is there any affordable kit (this station doesn’t have much of a budget) that could be used to give better control over these levels? I was thinking one of them cheap soundcraft 4 way mixers, behringher 4-way compressor and peak limiter like this, and filter off some of the low frequencies? its a bit of a “dirty way” of doing it but surely this could be set for most levels of sound and shapes/sizes of people and left as it is?

Behringer: MULTICOM PRO-XL MDX4600