"Running Board"

     I used a slang term the other day, one that might not be entirely clear outside of my line of work, "running board."  No, not those things along the bottom sides of an old car that make it easier to get in and out, where Doc Savage rides when he and his intrepid crew speed to the scene of another exotic crime in Depression-era NYC.

     "Running" as in "operating," and "board" as in "audio board," which is to say an audio mixer or audio console.  Nowadays, most people have seen a sound-mixing board, the kind of thing used at a concert or in a recording studio, often a vast and confusing array of controls, knobs and lights.  It's literally the heart of the effort, where all the microphones and other sound pick-ups connect, their levels are adjusted and mixed, and the end result goes out to the amplifiers, recorder, streaming box and/or broadcast transmitter.

     The technology grew up slowly, from a rack filled with amplifiers, volume controls, switches and maybe a jackfield like an old-time telephone operator's panel.  Eventually, the control arrangements became more or less standardized, first in homebuilt systems (some of which might be mounted through a single slab of wood or Bakelite, a "board," or built into a freestanding desk, a "console").  Those early efforts still had most of the electronics mounted in a row of tall equipment racks, with only the controls in front of the operator.  Western Electric and RCA, along with a little company in Quincy IL called Gates, were among the first to put the whole works into a large, desktop enclosure with a row of knobs along the front.

     Those early audio boards were the center of small radio stations: every audio signal that came and went would flow through it, and mastering the controls, in all their arcane variations, was an essential skill for the technicians -- "engineers" by convention if not degree -- and eventually the disc jockeys who replaced them and the studio announcers they'd worked with.  (Big stations and networks would have a "master control" setup, an audio switching system that selected among multiple studios and mixing consoles, but that was big-time stuff indeed.)

     As time went on and electronics got cheaper, stations might have a multitude of audio consoles -- one for the newsroom, one for recording commercials and local programs, one for on-air operations -- along with their associated equipment.

     And then a funny thing happened: audio went digital.  Digital audio works like any other big computer network: there are central computers that do the work, mixing, recording and playing back, and screen/keyboard/mouse or specialized hardware "control surfaces" where humans work the controls.  The big or small "audio board" of today still looks a lot like the old 1940s ones, if you'll allow for slide faders instead of rotary controls and push buttons instead of a fancy lever switches, but not a single note of audio passes through it.  Nope, that all happens in equipment mounted in tall racks down the hall; only the controls are in front of the operator.  Just like it was when the idea was first starting out.