New Britain herald., 1927-02-05

iiiill, anu lo uelcTlIllIieu Io pc dlOle ! when he went on the air. Accord ingly he searched for a quiet spot and discovered a small room under heath the stage. not far from the control board. The announcer's mi crophone and buzzer were quickly
 installed in this small room and Cross locked himself in.
 Telephone engineers had complet- cd the details of linking 26 stations
 into the special chain. and the tele- phone circuits had been tested to
 make certain that they would trans
 init without distortion the tones in-
 cluded in the wide frequency range
 involved. At the Chicago end of the
 curcuit, the mixing panel developed
 and installed under the supervision
 of Eugene F. Grossman. Assistant
 Manager of the Operation and En-
 gineering department of the Nation
 al Broadcasting company, was ready
 to blend the varit us clements of
 the music absorbed by the IS Sc.
 parate microphone channels in the
 auditorium into a smooth, well bal
 anced unit in which every portion
 would posses proper emphasis. Pre- siding over the special mixing pan
 el was MT. Grossman.
 Posted at an advantageous point in the auditorium proper was Ger ard Chatfield, National Broadcast
 ing company director of programs,
 with a telephone connecting with the mixing panel and a diagram of the auditorium stage as set for the opera, with the location of all the microphones designated by num- bers.
 To Messrs. Grossman and Chat field, the first night" of the na- tionwide broadcasting of grand opera came as the climax of weeks of planning and ten days of inten- sive effort of grueling, hard work. proving that the thing could be done. While four or five micro phones had been used in picking up orchestral concerts on former occasions, no one had ever at tempted to combine the output of 15 microphones until the experimental work was begun in preparation for the transmission of the Chicago Civic Opera company's production of Faust"
 For over a week, Chatfield and Grossman had attended rehearsals and performances of the Civic Opera monitoring the music on their pick up system, the most elaborate ever used in rdio broadcasting. They had listened to- the results with head phones and loud speakers, consult ed with musicians as to the manner in which the output of the pickup should be blended. They had constantly shifted the positions of the microphones on the stage. in the orchestra pit, the proscenium arch, over the heads of the audience in the auditorium, in the wings and backstage.
 They had tried every possible of microphones and musicians who had listened to the music over the monitor system had helped them with the fine points of and combining the sepa- rate portions of the music. They had experimented for hours on end to insure that shifting from one of microphones to an- other would not result in a notice able break in the continuity of the music, but that the melody would flow smoothly from one set Of in- struments to the next. They had paid particular attention to the To- cation of the artists on the stage and their movements during the performances.
 The first act of "Faust" was fin- ished several minutes before the of the opera had ex- pected, necessitating a longer inter- | between Acts I and II than had been surmised. TWenty-six | broadcast programs had been ar the second act at 10:30 D. m. east | ern standard time, and the act could not begin until after Mr. Cross had made his preliminary an |
 At exactly 10:30, Philips Carlin, | in the studio of WEAF, greeted the radio audience of the 26 stations i and told the listeners what was about to take place. As he finished, MT. Grossman touched Mir. Cross's . buzzer and the announcer, locked in the room, opened his microphone and in the shortened time allotted | him on account of the long inter- mission, set the invisible stage for