Abstract
AN illustrated description of Radio City, the new headquarters of the National Broadcasting Company of America, in a seventy-story building at Rockefeller Centre, New York, appears in World Radio of December 8. This company operates, from the main control desk at Radio City, a network of 85 broadcasting stations stretching right across the United States. The new central building has provision for thirty-five studios, of which sixteen have been put into operation since the opening of Radio City on November 15. The main studio is 78 ft. × 132 ft., and it extends vertically through three stories of the building. A massed orchestra of four hundred instrumentalists were comfortably accommodated in the auditorium studio during the special programmes broadcast in the week following the inauguration. In view of developments in television, the most interesting of the new arrangements is perhaps the so-called clover-leaf group of four studios on the ninth floor. These are built around a circular central control room, the floor of which can turn mechanically so as to face any one of the studios. This device enables four complete scenes to be prepared simultaneously and independently, and should considerably facilitate ‘scene-shifting’ in television programmes. All the studios have floors, walls and ceilings separated and insulated from the main building. As the provision of windows was impracticable, a large air-conditioning plant has been installed and it is claimed that this completely changes the air in the building every eight minutes. In addition to attention to the acoustical properties of the studios, technical improvements have been made in the amplifiers between the microphones and the transmitting stations, and the range of audiofrequencies faithfully reproduced now extends up to 11,000 cycles per second. This should ensure that the quality of the broadcasting programmes is limited principally by the capabilities of the receiving instruments and the conditions under which they are used by listeners.
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Opening of Radio City, New York. Nature 132, 998–999 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132998c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132998c0