EMAP Radio's National Director of Engineering, Alex Lakey, says the studios were installed as a replacement for facilities that were built seven years ago when Kiss moved to Mappin House from its old base on Holloway Road. "After seven years of abuse by Kiss DJs, the mixers were well past their sell-by-date and the original installation had been modified too many times," he explains. "We also needed to add extra facilities when the Kiss brand was extended into the former Vibe FM sites in Bristol and Bury St Edmunds. Building new studios gave us a great opportunity to refresh the look of the facility and bring our rooms up to date."
The project involved taking two of the rooms back to their original structure so that new fabric and lighting could be installed, along with new furniture, wiring, equipment, mixer surfaces and mounting systems for the numerous LCD monitors.
"We managed to achieve all this in just seven days for each room, starting at 9.01am on a Monday and finishing in time for the breakfast show the following Monday," Lakey adds. "The third room actually took only five days to complete because by that stage practice had made perfect and we were getting very good at it."
All three studios were designed and installed by the EMAP technical team, with additional help from the UK Logitek distributor Preco and Knotty Ash Woodworking, which manufactured the furniture to Alex Lakey's design.
"For these studios, we purchased new connectors and cable from VDC, which also supplies the majority of our ad hoc cabling and connector requirements. In the three years I have been with EMAP, we have now replaced over 90 per cent of the original cable infrastructure, in total now about 30km," Lakey adds.
(Jim Evans)
