Radio World Buyer’s Guide articles are intended to help readers understand why their colleagues chose particular products to solve various technical situations. This month’s articles focus on automation, traffic and billing.
Students at Clark Atlanta University, a liberal arts college with approximately 4,000 students in Georgia’s largest city, have long enjoyed access to broadcast and production opportunities through work study, internships and extracurricular programs. 
The Department of Mass Media Arts offers students practical experience in journalism, multimedia production and radio through an on-campus cable TV station, student streaming radio station and four production suites.
The university recently invested in technology upgrades for WSTU, the online student-led radio station, and all four production suites to establish a modernized infrastructure and workflow across all locations. That includes a Dante network that will move between the studios and allow students to record audio for WSTU programming and course projects.
Among the upgrades is a new ENCO DAD automation system.
Dr. Brian Bentley, Clark Atlanta University’s associate dean of arts and sciences and professor of mass media arts, said, “We wanted a more modern automation system that also offered a quick learning curve for students, and that we could have ready for the fall semester. The ease of use was immediately clear, beginning with the user interface.”
He and a colleague spent day one bringing music into the system and arranging them into different categories. “We can do a lot more with our production workflow now and with better efficiency.”
Bentley said that the upgrades represent efforts to make WSTU “more visible” on campus.
“We also purchased new mixers, microphones and PTZ cameras, the latter of which will allow us to start doing video podcasts. With DAD and our Dante network at the center of the workflow, we can produce much more student programming and in different formats.”
He said the school wanted to deploy technology that is used in broadcast today to help students compete better in the global job market.
Bentley’s intention is to add DAD systems to each of the production rooms, which he says will allow them to record content directly into the system everywhere.
“We can even convert our analog boards to Dante, and then move content over Cat-6 network cable and straight into DAD. We’re just at the starting gate with DAD, but this simplifies how our students work with both live and prepackaged content, and it is a perfect representation of how infusing the right hardware and software can really open new opportunities in radio.”
