Tech Notes
Talkers Magazine: The Comrex Hotline
Tech Talk: "The Comrex Hotline"
by Thomas R. Ray III, Reprinted courtesy of Talkers' Magazine
When was the last time this happened to you? The sales manager comes into your office with great news. Joe’s Auto Discounters is having a huge blowout sale, and they want your afternoon guy to do his entire show from their showroom tomorrow. The sale is a done deal. Great!
You go down the hall to see your engineer, and he informs you that, due to the 400 foot tall Mount Getintheway, you can’t get a Marti® shot off from Joe’s. You can’t get a broadcast loop or an ISDN line by tomorrow afternoon, and the two-line Comrex is on the road with the basketball play-by-play crew. You’ll have to do the entire four hours ON THE PHONE! It’ll sound like, well, never mind.
What would you think if I told you that if you added a piece of gear to your remote tools, you’d be able to do the program, on a regular phone line, with just about ISDN quality? No, we’re not talking Star Trek here, and no, I haven’t been smoking anything funny. You could do this remote with full broadcast quality if you used the newest item in the Comrex product line, the Comrex Hotline. And unlike the competition’s devices, the Comrex Hotline works, and works well!
The Hotline is a Digital Audio Codec that delivers from 5 kHz (two line frequency extender quality) to 10 kHZ (ISDN quality) audio, depending on the quality of the phone lines, to and from your studio. And it operates on a regular, ordinary phone line.
The Hotline is small, a little bigger that your average hand. It accepts a line input from your remote console, or just the mic if it’s a one mic event. It includes a built-in mix/minus circuit so that you can mix the local audio with the audio coming back from the studio to feed the PA system. It includes a headphone amplifier. And, it’s easy to use. You don’t need a degree in physics to configure or operate the device. Your typical promotions assistant or announcer can have it up and running in a matter of minutes.
I’ve had the opportunity to test the Hotline. The data stream it presents to the phone line is a little different than what your computer delivers while accessing America OnLine. Computer data is asynchronous, meaning that if the data glitches, your computer can request that the packet that glitched be re-sent. It doesn’t matter if the data is out of sequence, the computer makes it right. Audio data must be synchronous, meaning that it must arrive in exact sequence or it falls apart. I found with the lousy lines in my neighborhood that I could zip along on Compuserve at a comfortable 28.8, while the Hotline would connect reliably at 19.6.....but that still gave me 6 kHz bandwidth audio! More than airable for a talk program or on the spot news coverage. This unfortunately means that it probably won’t work on cellular. In my experience, 4800 asynchronous is the fastest reliable data rate that will go through a busy cell site, and the Hotline needs to connect at a minimum of 12,000 in synchronous mode.
The Hotline is not intended to replace your ISDN equipment. Because it uses regular phone lines, which can vary considerably, there is no guarantee it will work perfectly every time (ISDN lines are specially conditioned to function perfectly.) However, consider the possibilities for your station. You could handle the remote as stated above. You can get REAL audio from on-the-spot news events instead of having to use a two-way radio or cell phone. You can almost always access a phone line wherever you are. The Hotline would most likely pay for itself with remotes you otherwise couldn’t do in very little time.
The Comrex Hotline is an item I intend to add to my remote bag-o-tricks. If you have remote gear in the capital budget this year, the Hotline is well worth checking out. If you would like to demo the Hotline, it may be possible if you contact your friendly Comrex distributor. I understand the list is rather lengthy, but for the possibilities that your station will open up remote-wise, the Hotline is well worth the wait.
(Comrex note: Tom Ray wrote this article in February 1997 when HotLines were just introduced. We now have a full complement of demo units and are happy to schedule a no-charge 10-day trial.)
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