Echo Making

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 15, 24 October 1930, Page 8

Echo Making

Broadcasting Peculiarity WHEN Broadcasting House (the B.B.C.’s new London home) is nearly completed next: summer, a tremendous task awaits the staff experts (says the "Daily Herald’), a task which will call for six months’ hard work and masses of complicated calculations. This. is "putting in the echo." There are nine new studios and nine rehearsal rooms, all of which have to have a varying amount. of echo, from complete dullness to an echo of as much as two seconds. Hundreds of experiments and carefu tests have to be made. A trio in one room may need 14 seconds’ echo to be heard to the best effect, while a large orchestra may need no echo at all, In addition to the permanent’ echo, the B.B.C. has a means of "putting in an echo" from the control tower for a few minutes or seconds at a time. Wood absorbs certain notes and rejects others, while steel absorbs what wood rejects, so that a balance has to be struck if the perfect tone for reproduction is to be obtained. Recently, when one studio in Savoy Hill was re-decorated, it took three weeks to restore the right degree parts of echo.