The author is director of sales, marketing and business development for MaxxKonnect Group. 

A major studio relocation neared completion in Indianapolis this winter, as Radio One continued the move of nine radio stations, one television station and the Network Indiana head-end into a newly renovated facility. 

The move brings an end to decades of broadcasting from the Emmis Communications building on Monument Circle, a downtown landmark that served as temporary home to Radio One after the acquisition of the Emmis radio properties in 2022. 

While functional, the Emmis building’s scale and infrastructure reflected an earlier era of studio design and presented many challenges for full-scale modernization. 

Over time, the facility evolved into a patchwork of legacy analog infrastructure, early-generation digital systems and newer audio-over-IP deployments. Staff and studios were spread out over several floors, and the space had become inefficient and under-utilized.

What began as a planned year-long modernization project, slated for a start date in January of 2025, ultimately became a seven-week sprint, requiring close coordination between Radio One’s engineering staff and its contracted engineering partners, MaxxKonnect Technical. 

Despite many delays outside the broadcaster’s control, the group successfully transitioned all radio, TV and network operations to the new facility in December.

Collaboration under pressure

Nick Lopez, chief engineer for Radio One Indianapolis, has coordinated his local team of technicians to work alongside engineering contractor MaxxKonnect Technical, managing the move schedule and keeping all stations on the air throughout the transition. 

Meanwhile, John Takach, VP of corporate engineering for Radio One, has provided overall technical leadership, collaborating with the MaxxKonnect team and building management as well as making many critical decisions on the spot to keep the job site running.

Mike Hutchens, VP of engineering at MaxxKonnect, led his team in the design and install of the studio and TOC infrastructure. Senior engineer Mark Borchert has worked alongside him on the execution, with the entire MaxxKonnect team having a hand in the build as needed to meet the tight deadline.

Return to St. Joseph Street

The new broadcast home, at 21 East Saint Joseph Street and known internally as “St. Joe,” represents a return to Radio One’s original Indianapolis footprint. 

The facility previously housed the company’s local operations for many years and has since undergone extensive renovation, with the old studios and offices gutted back to the brick walls before brand-new construction took shape. While smaller than the Monument Circle facility, St. Joe was redesigned to maximize usable space and create operational efficiency.

Studios for music stations — including legacy urban brand WHHH(FM) Hot 100.9, urban AC WTLC(FM) 106.7 and country stalwart WLHK(FM) 97.1 Hank FM — common space for announcers, a TV master control room and studio, as well as an impressive TOC will occupy the first floor. 

The second floor is home to larger talk studios and control rooms for sports-talk leader 93.5/107.5 The Fan, flagship news station WIBC(FM), plus statewide Network Indiana, along with 10 multi-use production studios, a full newsroom, a dedicated podcasting studio and space for the group’s programming staff. 

Takach said, “Smaller production rooms as well as studios setup like TV studios for the talk stations, with all of the hosts facing the camera, instead of the old way where everyone faced each other” are examples of how Radio One is modernizing use of the new space. 

Management occupies the third floor, and a small penthouse tech center on the fourth floor acts as a hub for off-air reception, network uplink and connectivity. These include multiple redundant fiber connections, as well as wireless and satellite internet solutions provided by MaxxKonnect.

Unified IP-based architecture

All studios are built around an IP-based audio architecture using Axia Livewire platform. On-air studios are equipped with Axia Quasar surfaces and engines, while production studios use Axia Radius consoles, all with StudioCore I/O devices. Newsroom and ENG positions employ Axia Altus virtual consoles, providing flexible access to shared resources throughout the facility. 

The build provided an opportunity to standardize the technical environment from the ground up.

In total, more than 70 Axia xNodes have been deployed to handle analog, AES, GPIO and mixed-signal I/O, with additional capacity planned as construction on the main floor continues. Radio One also standardized automation across all stations with RCS Zetta, which replaced a variety of legacy systems.

Even though the amount of audio and logic I/O has been cut in half at the new facility, compared to Monument Circle, Takach describes the switching and routing capabilities of the new Axia systems as “mindboggling.” 

Among the innovations at the facility is the use of small LED monitors at the entrance to every studio in place of traditional on-air lights. Controlled by Axia’s Pathfinder, the screens indicate more than just a studio being in use. Hutchens says, “It’s not just mic hot or not, the system can annunciate multiple types of alarms and levels.”

TOC for scale and resilience

The new Radio One Indianapolis Technical Operations Center was designed to support current needs and future expansion. 

The facility includes 16 equipment racks, with one dedicated to enterprise IT and the remaining 15 supporting radio, television and network satellite operations. Network Indiana is the originator for the Indianapolis Pacers of the NBA as well as the NFL Colts and numerous college broadcasts, plus statewide news and other programming. 

Additional racks are allocated for Axia console engines, Axia xNodes and audio network switching, while a dedicated rack houses multiple 25/7 program delay units. In the fourth-floor penthouse NOC, two 16-channel MaxxKonnect RMT416 multi-tuners were added to provide off-air confidence monitoring and silence alerting via SNMP. 

Every rack in the facility is equipped with multiple IP-enabled PDUs to allow remote reboot of nearly every piece of gear remotely.

Power resilience was a critical prerequisite. A 100 kVA, three-phase APC UPS, spanning three full racks, was installed to protect core broadcast systems prior to station cutovers. 

“From my point of view,” said Hutchens, “the showstoppers were the UPS and making sure we had reliable internet for IP STL” before he would give the green light for the stations to move.

STL migration to IP delivery

As part of the relocation, Radio One transitioned its aging STL infrastructure to fully IP-based audio delivery. Tieline Gateway codecs were deployed to support internet-based transport for program audio. 

Ensuring reliable connectivity proved to be one of the final critical-path items prior to the move. Connectivity solutions utilizing 5G and Starlink Enterprise have been implemented by MaxxKonnect to support IP STL and office traffic to supplement the fiber connections. 

Seven weeks

The project was envisioned as a 12-month build beginning in early 2025, with a planned move late in the year. However, a series of delays, including site-access limitations, supply-chain disruptions and infrastructure work outside Radio One’s control, significantly compressed the schedule.

By late summer, it became clear that the move would need to be executed in phases. Phase One focused on completing the TOC and second-floor studios with the 10 identical production studios in use as temporary homes for music stations. Phase Two, which remains in progress, includes construction of the main-floor music station studios as well as television master control and studio space.

With a firm requirement to cease broadcast operations from Monument Circle by Dec. 31, 2025, engineering teams were forced to execute Phase One under extreme time constraints. Most of the core integration work occurred between mid-September and Thanksgiving weekend. Studios were given primary focus as the main floor TOC didn’t see power delivered until early November. 

In a mere three weeks, racks were filled with gear and wiring was completed to allow the Axia network to be brought online. By late November, systems were configured and ready for cutover.

With boxes full of chairs, desktop monitors, tools and parts lining the hallways, station moves began the week of Dec. 9. Monument Circle operations were vacated before morning drive on Dec. 12, nearly three weeks ahead of the year-end deadline.

Work in progress

As this article was written in late January 2026, construction on the first floor at St. Joe was underway with the goal to relocate music stations from their temporary second-floor production studios into purpose-built first-floor air studios by March.

Once complete, the facility will represent a fully consolidated, IP-based broadcast plant supporting radio, television and network operations from a single, modernized location.

MaxxKonnect President Josh Bohn praised Radio One for establishing a facility designed to support evolving production and distribution demands well into the future. 

“A major publicly traded broadcast company in 2026 building a 30-studio complex to ensure each station has its own home and 10 production studios is something to be proud of. We are so happy to be working with such a stellar team at Radio One.”

For the staff of Radio One Indianapolis, the move closes the book on Monument Circle. Asked about what makes the new facility great, Takach said, “Every format you can think of is in one building — podcast studios for content creation, TV-ready talk studios.” Even though the temporary quarters on the second floor at St. Joe are a little tight today, he added, “The building will be ideal once the first floor is complete.” 

Read about other interesting radio studio projects in the free ebook “Sweet New Studios for 2026.”

The post Radio One Modernizes in Indianapolis appeared first on Radio World.

“This was all about breathing new life into our studios.”

A two-year project improved workflows for KUT 90.5 FM and KUTX 98.9 FM in Austin, Texas. KUT Public Media operates both stations.

Technology Coordinator Rojith Thomas said, “We began by upgrading two key production spaces. The first was the studio for ‘Texas Standard,’ a daily statewide live news program. The second was ‘Newsmaker,’ which has long been home to podcasts and interviews and now also produces the local live news show ‘Austin Signal.’”

After completing those upgrades, they turned their attention to the heart of the operation and gave the main on-air studios for KUT and KUTX a full refresh in mid-2025.

“Our goal was clear and ambitious: We wanted to modernize everything with advanced AoIP consoles and infrastructure. This allowed us to streamline workflows, improve reliability and create a flexible setup that is ready for the future.”

The technical team was Todd Callahan, Jacob Rockey and Rojith Thomas. Each played an active role in every stage, from testing demo equipment to purchasing and installing the new systems.

Thomas coordinated the technical aspects, including planning, integration and overseeing the upgrade process.

“In today’s broadcast industry, reliability and flexibility are essential,” he said.

“Broadcasters need systems that allow them to operate from anywhere in the world, and who knows, maybe even from space someday. With that vision in mind, our goal was to create a setup that works seamlessly in a hybrid environment.”

Telos Alliance was the manufacturer and primary vendor, supplying Axia Quasar consoles and related AoIP equipment to replace older Axia Fusion consoles and PowerStations.

Dealers Gary Tibbot of Broadcast General Store and Mary Schnelle from Broadcast Depot helped source the hardware.

KUT wanted to preserve the traditional experience of having a console at the center of the studio while also enabling full remote control for situations such as live remote broadcasts.

“The Axia Quasar console and engine make this possible, giving us the best of both worlds: the familiar hands-on feel of a studio console combined with the ability to manage it from anywhere.”

The station has a long relationship with Telos Alliance. It uses Telos Enterprise and Pathfinder routing control, 25-Seven Program Delay Managers, Z/IPStream R/20 streaming encoders and Z/IP One codecs for remote contributions, Omnia processors and Minnetonka AudioTools software.

“One interesting detail that fellow engineers might appreciate is how we use the user button panels on our consoles,” Thomas said.

“On the Quasar SR consoles, we have eight user buttons configured for a variety of functions. These include reloading different profiles, initiating talkback to specific codecs, and controlling Program Delay Manager features such as Dump, Exit, Build and Cough.”

Similarly, in the production studios, they use a five-button panel for show producers. This allows them to communicate easily with the host and between studios, making live production more efficient and seamless.

Thomas said the project was more than a technical upgrade. “It was a transformation. Our studios now feel more responsive and intuitive, and more connected to the creative energy of our team.”

Read more coverage of notable studio projects in the free ebook “Sweet New Studios for 2026.”

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This is excerpted from the ebook “Sweet New Studios 2026.”

Last September, 89.7 WUWM “Milwaukee’s NPR” set out to replace an older TDM-based system with a Telos AoIP infrastructure to serve four studios. It also wanted to rework its technical core to support those rooms and to improve redundancy in its air chain.

WUWM was founded in 1964 and is licensed to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents; it is operated by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee College of Letters and Science. Its studios are in Chase Tower in downtown Milwaukee, Wis.

Studio Engineer Jason Rieve led the project for the station, with integration and system architecture by Summit Technology Group.

“We needed to modernize and reduce our old systems to a more reliable system that can be more easily accessed remotely, allowing the freedom to work from anywhere,” Rieve said.

The job included installing the Telos Axia StudioCore engine, Axia iQ consoles and Axia xNode2s.

WUWM opted to use its existing furniture, which was in excellent condition and had been customized to fit the rooms and workflows.

Summit deployed its own AirLux Studio Signaling product, which takes cues from Axia Pathfinder to signal the on-air or recording status of each studio. New EV RE320 mics and studio monitors are mounted gracefully on Yellowtec Mika arms, providing a fresh and modern look.

“The hard part was going to be how to completely remove ALL of our infrastructure and replace it, while still staying on air,” Rieve said. “I believe that was the biggest challenge. It was amazing how many boxes of wires were removed.”

We asked whether WUWM is seeing the kind of studio trends we’ve noted elsewhere.

“Yes,” Rieve said. “More and more our studios are used just for interviews. We no longer need to have tape decks, record players or DAT machines, since everything is online. Moving to an AoIP solution will allow us to be more fluid as things progress in our industry.”

The work was done while staff and air personalities were actively occupying the space. It was also overlaid by an automation upgrade and hardware refresh, said Summit President Paul Stewart.

“It was a lot of moving parts that all had to be coordinated with great precision to avoid any interruption to the air chain. We were successful in minimizing the downtime to a small window of downtime in the overnight hours to achieve the switchover,” Stewart said.

“In many ways this build embraces the advent of virtualization, with an emphasis on studio redundancy and the ability to quickly and easily go live from any studio room. The use of the Axia Studio Core hardware created an environment where any source can be called up on any console. This was particularly useful in Studio C, the station’s interview and performance space.”

A key goal was simplification.

“We reduced the number of equipment racks in the TOC from seven to five and decommissioned countless pieces of equipment. All this was done while preserving the redundant air chain to provide failover due to equipment failure or loss of network connectivity.”

The station’s transmitter facility is a few miles north of downtown in Estabrook Park; WUWM broadcasts from the only self-supported tower in the area. It uses a point-to-point fiber connection to the site, backed up by internet connectivity.

Read more project stories in the new Radio World ebook.

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KEXP Seattle and KEXP Bay Area (KEXC) are operated by Friends of KEXP, a non-profit organization based in Seattle.  

“We are replacing the audio playout platform and asset management system in nine studios, including three remote,” said Director of Engineering Jamie Alls.

“This function was handled by Dalet Galaxy platform for the past 10 years and was a single platform doing both functions. The new system will replace the asset management function with OrangeLogic OrangeDAM, a cloud-based asset management system.”

The playout function will be handled by the Myriad 6 Playout platform from Broadcast Radio and will be on-prem. 

KEXP requirements for a playout system are unique in that it has a library of a million titles and content assets. 

“That library needs to be searchable and available to play to air within three seconds of selection,” Alls said.

“KEXP curates their music programming ‘on the fly’ by a live DJ 24/7. Therefore the normal automation tools prevalent in the industry have limited use at KEXP.”

That tight turnaround for playout required an on-prem solution and then a sync function between the two platforms.

“We’ve developed custom software for achieving some of this, called the Digital Music Importer or DMI, which gathers the file and relevant metadata from the MusicBrainz open-source music database.”

KEXP’s library also has custom profanity ratings, clean edits and music content produced in-house. 

“API calls between the platforms achieve a sync between the on-prem copies of the library, and the ‘source of truth’ library in OrangeDAM in the cloud.”

Work is scheduled to be completed in the second quarter of 2026.

“We are in the final stages of integrating the two platforms and finalizing our sync from cloud to on-prem for relevant content types. Then testing and UI refinement before a staged rollout to our main stakeholders, 50-plus DJs who curate our programming.”

The framework

KEXP studios are on the Seattle Center campus in the Uptown neighborhood of Seattle. A team of five is working on the project.

Alls is the project sponsor as director of engineering. Broadcast Engineering Specialist Nel Jee Aa Na is the overall project manager. The setup of OrangeDAM is led by KEXP Library and Archives Manager Afsheen Nomai, MSIS, Ph.D., CA. 

Setup of the Myriad playout on the software side is led by Senior Systems Engineer Clint Dimick, while audio and traffic integrations are led by Broadcast Engineer Ian Davidson. Senior Software Developer Sean Dougherty wrote the code for the DMI.  

In addition to OrangeLogic and Broadcast Radio, KEXP also contracted software development help from AVP, an OrangeLogic partner for custom integrations. 

KEXP is a Wheatstone plant with LX-24 consoles throughout. InRush Broadcast Services helped with Wheatstone scripting for the traffic split setup. 

“We use GatesAir Intraplex units for the STL to Sutro Tower in the Bay Area. The STL in Seattle is via dark fiber that we light up with BroMan CWDM hardware that carries network, audio and video to the transmitter site.”

Moving the library to the cloud was a big step into uncharted territory. 

“Dalet runs on a private virtualization platform on-prem. Over 20 servers in that virtualization environment were required to make it run smoothly. That became very expensive to maintain,” Alls said.

“OrangeDAM is a cloud-based solution that forces us to evolve our thinking about operations, network security and workflows. Keeping our playout on-prem requires a tight integration as content and metadata have to flow in both directions,” he said.

“BroadcastRadio has been an amazing partner in providing custom augmentations to their product as we discover various needs, both with the user interface and backend API calls.”

Tools for what KEXP had in mind are hard to find in the radio industry, Alls told Radio World.

“We had to search for vendors who could meet our requirements. When we’d try to explain to some of the bigger players in this space about what we wanted, they either looked at us dumbfounded, or tried to get us to adopt more automation. 

“We are, generally speaking, anti-automation. Being human-powered is a large part of our brand identity, and so we spend a lot of time building or configuring tools for our unique purposes.”

Remote-friendly

KEXP has expanded remote broadcast access to the library so that DJs can program essentially from anywhere. 

“Previously, we have one remote DJ kit we call DJ-R, where we provided a remote desktop session to a purpose-built Dalet playout workspace as well as a Wheatstone Screenbuilder mixer that allows DJs to do the manual crossfades between tracks.”

This solution has proven popular, and the programming department uses it almost daily. Sometimes this results in shows back to back having to coordinate the handoff of DJ-R between the two hosts. 

“The new system will have three remote broadcast studios intended to be accessed remotely. One will be dedicated to our Bay Area programming, and the other two will be available for back-to-back handoff between DJs that are not at the main studio.”

Alls added that the station has an uncommon problem in that it plays traffic for two different markets, and potentially more.

“Since we are hand-crafted, we don’t have the luxury of automating the audio routing from a broadcast log. During a simulcast broadcast, which is 97% of the time, DJs fire a traffic break manually at the end of a song or air break, which triggers a routing change so we can send the Bay Area traffic to the right place, and keep the Seattle traffic going to all other endpoints including streams and FM,” he said.

“Since we will now have five studios — two local and three remote — from which this command can originate, we’ve had to devise a system for the DJ to ‘take traffic’ when they go on air in a studio, which gives them control of firing the two traffic logs simultaneously from the designated studio.”

InRush was instrumental in helping program the “take traffic” function on SS8 button panels in the LX-24 board. 

“During a ‘breakaway’ broadcast, where a local Bay Area show is programming independently of Seattle, with its own traffic, we needed to give that studio control of its own playlist. It got complicated quickly!”

He called it another example of the complexity involved in giving humans the ability to program on the fly.

Alls said KEXP has built its brand on providing live curation with humans responding in real time to the world we inhabit. 

“We’ve found that the listeners who value that connection and programming are willing to support it. It’s way more expensive and ‘inefficient’ to operate this way, but as a non-profit, we can devote resources to the technology that adds that value that people want to support. We are fortunate to have both a listener base and management that ‘gets’ it.”

This is excerpted from the free ebook “Sweet New Studios for 2026.”

[Check Out More of Radio World’s Ebooks Here]

The post KEXP Builds Around Human Power appeared first on Radio World.

Huskers Radio Network, part of the University of Nebraska, feeds more than 30 affiliate stations with sports coverage that includes its nationally known football program, basketball and volleyball, plus associated shows. The school is in the Big Ten Conference and competes in NCAA Division I.

The athletics department moved its entire multimedia department at Memorial Stadium to a renovated second floor, creating a 25,200-square-foot facility. It includes a variety of media including HuskerVision, designed and built by Beck TV, as well as the new Huskers Radio Network (HRN) facility built by Inrush Broadcast Services.

For HRN this wasn’t a revolution in technology but a location change, a refresh in hardware and cabling, and cleanup of documentation. 

The project also shored up the important Barix distribution network that feeds every affiliate and added new custom WheatNet Screenbuilder virtual control panels to ease daily management of the distribution network.

The HRN studios include a video studio, a control room studio and two production studios, all in an open floorplan. 

The furniture and Wheatstone gear, including LXE surfaces and various varieties of blades, had been installed previously; these were documented, moved and freshened. The RCS Zetta system also got a hardware refresh and a database and audio move.

The overall facility construction began in 2020 and was open to integrators in April 2025. The HRN integration was completed by the end of July.

HRN was integrated into the overall multimedia Technical Operations Center over two visits in June and July. The studios were moved and upgraded to the new facility over the July 4 holiday. 

Redesigning the head-end equipment for HRN enabled the team to reduce TOC footprint, as HRN was leaving its own dedicated rack room and joining the combined multimedia TOC.

Key technical components included the Wheatstone AoIP infrastructure, RCS Zetta automation and Barix affiliate distribution system. BSW supplied new radio equipment. Inrush Voice provides phone service to HRN’s Telos VX talk show system.

The work leaders included Brandon Meier, project manager for HRN and HuskerVision; Scott Guthrie, chief engineer of HRN; Garett Hill, technical expert at HRN and HuskerVision; Josh Hilkemann from Playfly, which runs day-to-day operations of the HRN; Alex Bonello from HDVmixer; Tom Lawler from RCS; and the Inrush integration team. BeckTV was the integrator for the HuskerVision side.

“This is a complex production and distribution facility entirely owned by a university athletics department and run by production and network sales partner Playfly,” said Rob Bertrand, partner at Inrush.

“It utilizes a unique implementation of Barix distribution hardware in a design and network methodology that was implemented by a prior engineer. 

“Combined with RCS Zetta macros for affiliate network closures, it’s incredibly effective as a cost-effective owned distribution network. But it took some coordination to discover all the nuances of the prior engineer’s design as well as shifting ownership of certain web components from one entity to another.”

In addition, Inrush provided custom Wheatstone scripts to create a quick and effective GUI to trigger salvos for each of the four networks, change network audio monitoring and track/confirm closures are being fired to all affiliates. 

“Previously, HRN struggled to track which source was feeding each network and it was difficult and opaque to confirm that affiliate closures had been properly sent. Now, any of the four LXE studio positions can perform these actions from their touch screens, which are attached to the LXE engine.”

Bertrand said that while there are no project components residing in the cloud, the virtualized technology offered by WheatNet Screenbuilder enables complex switching and logic arrays to be built and the operation monitored easily by operators. 

“Creating such an environment before the AoIP world would have involved custom boxes filled with relays, back walls adorned with numerous 66 blocks and cross-connects, and even then it would have been nearly impossible to provide the logging and confirmation now available via the virtualized WheatNet Screenbuilder functionality that Inrush delivered to HRN.”

Cameron Boswell, Inrush SVP of integration services, said, “We were substantially impressed with what Huskers had already achieved using Barix hardware. We cleaned it up and standardized its logic and audio implementation, but we were really building on what was there. 

“Their Barix distribution network is cost-effective and extraordinarily effective in meeting the IP-based distribution needs for the four disparate channels of the Huskers Radio Network, including matching backup encoders.”

The Huskers Media team brought Inrush back for subsequent visit to rebuild the play-by-play booth in the stadium.

This is a story from the ebook “Sweet New Studios for 2026.” Read about more projects here.

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