seven second delay

Factual Questions
1

I did a search of the archive, and did not find any threads that addressed the particular question I have. If I missed it, I’m sure somebody will point it out. Failing that:

Many, if not most, live radio and TV shows have a seven-second delay on their broadcasts for the purpose of bleeping out obscenities, vulgar language, and whatnot. (I’m thinking more of radio, but TV shouldn’t be that different) That’s all great, but how do they actually make it work?

Say I’m the guy in the studio with my finger on the dump button (Who does this, BTW?). I hear a guest caller on the talk show drop the F-word. By what mechanism do I bleep it out?

I’ve got 7 seconds before it’ll hit the airwaves. Do I start counting to seven and hit the button right before the F-word broadcasts? Do I scramble with dials and kill it while it’s sitting there waiting? All while listening for another possible curse?

For that matter, what am I doing when I dump something? Do I replace the time with an equal amount of silence, bleep, or whatever? Or do I simply REMOVE that time from the broadcast, to be somehow made up down the line?

Am I making sense? Thanks…

2

Basically, you hold down the button for 7 seconds, until the offending words have been cut off.

3

maybe in the olden days, or at a radio station that doesn’t have the best tools, chuck, but not anymore.

at the 2 stations i worked at that actually had a delay, one (crappy college station) would make the noise for the entire 7 seconds. so you lose the 6+ seconds that were unoffending words to the beep.

the other station, when you hit the dump, it’d ‘dump’ the 7 seconds of audio in the temporary memory, and jump to ‘now’ time–undelayed. very noticible. then, where there’s silence, it adds time to the delay until there’s another 7 seconds in it. for example, if a host has a second of silence…aw, hell i dunno. it’s too confusing, and it’s late. but basically it makes up time. no wait…i know. it gradually ‘slows’ down the live b’cast, until there’s 7 secs added up. we used to do it before one host, over the ABC news at the top of the hour. we’d flip the control back and forth between studio and air, and you could hear the difference. i belive the 7 seconds is added together over a minute’s time, IIRC.

as far as i know, most stations use digital memory banks to do this. you can buy 'em, i dunno why’d you use them at home tho.

oh yeah, and then you’d have art bell, who’d run a 7 second promo of his phone numbers instead of the beep over the offending 7 seconds.

4

Talk shows are the only ones that really need the delay.
Someone says a dirty word and you hit the button.
The button (or the engineer) dumps the phone call and you’re mike is now hot on real time. And because you’re on real time you might take up some of time by explaining that the phone caller said a dirty word.
The offending second (and the 6 other seconds around it) disappear and your unit starts building time again.
As it builds up the 7 second shield you can talk about why you shouldn’t say dirty words on the radio, joke about it with your engineer or guest (if you have one), restate the subject you’ve been talking about or even go to commercials.

5

We had a device at the TV station I worked at that had a cool mode that worked quite well. You hit the button right after you heard a naughty word. The device would wait 6.8 seconds and beep over whatever was coming out of the output side for one second. It worked pretty well if you had good “aim.” We also enjoyed replacing the standard beep with oinks, splats, ricochets, crashes, farts, and various other choirs of onamatopoeia.

6

[anecdotes]
When I was working at a sports talk station, which also was the flagship station for Cleveland Indians broadcasts, there were several engineers who just couldn’t get the hang of working the delay. Needless to say, they didn’t last long.

We were on 10 seconds there, and if there was a profanity, there was no waiting–you dumped right now. The air talent would usually just say, “We lost the call,” without getting into the whys and wherefores. We also either recycled the delay right away, or waited until after the next spot break. Recycling during a client’s commercial causes audio slowdown, which is a big no-no if they hear it. You don’t want to have to do make-goods in afternoon drive.

When they really had problems, though, was meeting up the Indians pregame broadcast. Games were not handled from the main air studio; they originated in a master control studio down the hall, which handled our signal as well as feeding some 25 stations down the network lines. The games, of course, were not broadcast on delay, for the simple reason that anyone watching the local TV broadcast and listening to the radio broadcasters would notice they weren’t in sync.

So, the engineer who was handling the show prior to the pregame would have to switch the signal to Indians master control exactly at 18:35:00 (usually). That required backtiming your final 2-minute spot break, :30 traffic report, and air talent segment to make that join. You’d subtract that 2:30 from 18:35:00, meaning your host had to be done talking at 18:32:30. So, at 18:31:30, you start a :60 music bed, and count him down at :30, :20, :10, 5-4-3-2-1. Unfortunately, what a lot of people forgot to do was subtract an extra 10 seconds for the delay. You start the bed at 18:31:20, get out at 18:32:20, play your 2 minutes of spots and your :30 traffic, then switch your monitor speaker to the “air” signal, which is 10 seconds behind you. When you hear traffic end, dump the delay and switch to the Indians.

I can’t tell you how many times people forgot that extra damned 10 seconds, and either let the game run in delay (which invariably resulted in a phone call from the GM or PD), or “ramped” out of it, which caused audio speedup.
[/anecdotes]

7

The few times I’ve heard it (on at least some Australian radio and TV shows you can say “fuck”, but there are limits), you tend to hear: “And… we’re out of delay.”

picmr

8

In a similar situation to pldennison, occasionally when Yankees games are broadcast on our local FOX station, the dalay of the television station and that of the AM station that would also broadcast the games wouldn’t be in sinc.

Many fans would rather listen to the radio and mute the TV than listen to the crappy FOX play-by-play guys. The problem is that because the delay was at different intervals, you could hear the radio guys announce the pitch and call and, 4 seconds later, watch the pitcher throw the ball and the ump make the call. It’s really weird.

9

Thanks a lot, you guys! :slight_smile:

10

I suppose TV does the same thing but recently, during the morning show on the East Coast, a woman in the audience bared her breasts and it was broadcast (unfortunately I missed it and only saw it covered over later). On the west Coast it was edited out.

I guess the guy who was supposed to have his finger on the button was too surprised to act.

11

sailor, Jay Leno showed that piece from the Today show during his monologue, with her boobs de-rezzed (either that or she had really square nipples!). Katie Couric’s astonished expression afterwards was priceless!

12

A related new technology allows radio shows to actually shorten “live” radio (the most famous example is Rush Limbaugh). They put a five minute “delay” at the beginning of the show, and make it up throughout the show by editing out moments of silence (all digitally and automatically). Then they can sell that extra five minutes to advertisers.

13

Interesting anecdote, but why is this delay a problem? Why would people watch a game on TV and listen to the same game on radio?

Also, I once did exactly that by accident, and noticed that the TV was behind the radio by almost 10 seconds. That’s much larger than satellite delay. My WAG was that the TV station needed the delay to choose the appropriate camera for each scene. Is that right?

14

Oh nevermind…

I thought this thread was going to be a question about defective hand grenades.

15

*Why would people watch a game on TV and listen to the same game on radio? *

Because the radio announcers are often much more entertaining to listen to than the TV guys. Their job is to create an image of the game vivid enough for listeners to feel like they can actually see everything that’s going on. TV announcers tend to wander off into private discussions about averages, last week’s game, or some second-string player who’s promised to win this one for his sister’s husband’s chiropractor’s nephew, who’s in the hospital with terminal nasal syphillis.

–sublight, with fond memories of Johnny Most and the Boston Celtics.

16

AMEN

17

Is this making up/killing time (to lose/gain 7 or 10 seconds’ delay) generally done simply by speeding up/slowing down? I’ve heard of packages that can, say, take a 58-second commercial spot and turn it into a 60-second one without lowering the pitch of the sounds. Is this possible/practical in real time?

I think I get the basic idea now, thanks to you folks. Seven (or ten, or whatever) seconds of audio gets stored in some kind of digital buffer before being broadcast. When something gets dumped, that usually amounts to simply flushing the buffer and instantly switching to live broadcast, at least temporarily.

Obviously, you want to build the buffer up again, but the question is how. The simplest way, somebody mentioned, is to have the host start talking again 7 seconds before a (live) commercial break ends, save his words to the buffer, and switch to delay again when the commercial ends. Seamless, and doesn’t involve anything really weird. But, you have to wait for a break, which may not be convenient.

I guess the next best thing is to do what ubermensch said, which is to gradually grow the buffer back in over the next minute or so. This would require broadcasting 53 seconds of show over 60 seconds, so you have to slow things down somehow. You could just play out the buffer at 88% speed for one minute, and then you’d be caught up. This would probably cause a noticeable change in the pitch of the host’s voice, though, right?

OR (getting to the point), can you run the aforementioned magical time-dilation-without-pitch-change program in real time to facilitate catching up? Or is that just not practical?

18

And I thought this was an “F-word on SNL” thread.

Here in KC, if you cuss on the Johnny Dare show, they generally broadcast it, but then admonish the guy or gal, and play a short clip by Tard that’s “All the stuff you can’t say” that’s about 30 seconds long, and is just a big ass list of cusswords, with the middle of each one bleeped or honked or splorted or bzz’d out or something, but it’s still dreadfully obvious what Tard is actually saying. You can hear, like “Muh-bleep-fuh-bleep-er.” It’s funny the first bajillion times, but quite tedious from then on out.

Of course, I sleep till 2, so who am I to bitch about morning show guys?

–Tim