Recently, “Eddie” from our engineering department described in intricate detail, what he had to do to music playing on our phone system. That proved so popular, we thought you’d appreciate his recent detailed note about how to place elastics on microphones should you find them tangled.

While this probably has limited general appeal, we hope that it’ll give you some insight into the day to day workings of a radio station:

Peeps,

I’m having to repair (well, just put right) a lot of microphone elastics around the building lately.  I don’t know who the phantom ‘tangler’ is, but it’s becoming time consuming!

So, I’ve written some nice instructions here on how to put them back to how they should be: -

Firstly, untangle the two pieces of elastic and put them to one side.

Now put the small ‘lug’ on one of the elastics into the hole on the top of the spiked frame.

Now stretch the elastic so that is stretches around all of the spikes on the top.

Now do the same with the bottom set of spikes.

You should now have a kind of cube of elastic.

Next you need to fit the microphone frame into these elastics – it’s much easier than you think!  Place the microphone frame inside the spikey mount, and clip the frame into the top piece of elastic.

You should now have the top piece clipped in, and the bottom still forming a square at the bottom.  Now pull the microphone down so that the parts that you clipped the top piece of elastic into are level with the middle ring.  Pull the bottom elastic up at the clip points and clip it into the same place on the microphone frame on all four sides.

Now you’ll see that the microphone is suspended by the elastic and it looks how it should!  Microphone elastic repair from entanglement, done.

Cheers,

Eddie.
PS We’re not the only UK broadcaster posting ridiculously complicated technical details. Check out this recent BBC blog piece detailing how Radio 3 takes the audio from the Royal Albert Hall during the Proms.