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The Mast Log Notes on broadcast and recorded sound

Section

In the Room

Six pieces about the part of the work that happens before anything is transmitted: capturing a voice, wiring a room so it can hold a conversation, deciding how loud the result should be, and organising the hours and the rights around it.

A studio is a strange kind of room. It is built to be acoustically boring, wired so that no signal ever arrives back where it started, and run against a clock that was drawn months in advance. None of that is arbitrary. Each convention exists because a specific failure kept happening: a caller hearing their own delayed voice, a jingle that vanished under a song, a station that missed a legal identification, an hour that sounded identical to the previous one.

The order below runs from the physical to the contractual. Microphones and wiring are about electricity and air. Loudness is about measurement and about a ceiling that nobody can raise. The broadcast day and the format are about attention. Licensing is about who owns the two separate copyrights inside every recording, which is the question that stops most podcasts from playing the song they want.

Overhead view of a radio studio desk with a broadcast console, a boom arm holding a large dynamic microphone, closed-back headphones and two screens showing a playout log.
The layout of a self-operated studio: the console within reach of the microphone, the log on screen, and the monitors muted the moment the fader opens.

Pieces in this section

  • Who gets paid when a record plays

    Composition against sound recording, performing rights organisations against SoundExchange, and the statutory licence that covers streaming but not podcasts.

    14 minute read4 notes

  • The wiring of a room that talks back

    Console buses, the telephone hybrid, mix-minus, the profanity delay, and what happened when the wiring became a network.

    13 minute read3 notes

  • Loudness, and the ceiling nobody can raise

    K-weighting, gating, integrated loudness, true peak, and the ten unit gap between what broadcast asks for and what streaming platforms normalise to.

    14 minute read4 notes

  • Microphones, and the six inches that decide everything

    Dynamic against condenser, polar patterns, proximity effect, the inverse square law, and why the room usually matters more than the microphone.

    12 minute read3 notes

  • A format is a promise about the next song

    Rotation categories, separation rules, imaging, burn, and the research methods that decide when a song leaves the list.

    12 minute read3 notes

  • The shape of a broadcast day

    Dayparts, the hour clock, the stopset, the legal identification, and the ratings vocabulary that explains why the clock looks the way it does.

    13 minute read4 notes

The other section

  • On Air

    Four pieces on the transmitted side: FM baseband, the AM band after sunset, coverage limits and emergency alerting.

  • Glossary

    Every term used in these six pieces, defined briefly, with a link back to the piece that explains it in full.