The reception area at SIRIUS HQ buzzes with activity.

Big entertainment in the Big Apple
It's hard to imagine a better location for the headquarters of satellite radio giant SIRIUS, than right smack in the middle of New York City, the entertainment capital of the world. The folks responsible for programming and transmitting SIRIUS' 60 channels of commercial-free music, and 40 channels of news, sports, and entertainment work at 1221 Avenue of the Americas, in the heart of mid-town Manhattan. From the windows of their offices on the 36th floor, you can look out on the Broadway theater district, Radio City Music Hall, and the studios of David Letterman, The Today Show, and Saturday Night Live.

As I witnessed on a recent visit, the electric atmosphere of the streets outside SIRIUS headquarters is equally evident inside the offices. Everyone I met — from the receptionist at the front desk, to the stream designers behind the soundboards, to Mark Kalman, the Vice President of the National Broadcast Studio and our "tour guide" — was abuzz with enthusiasm and excitement about the fledgling satellite radio enterprise.

Light floods into the waiting area at SIRIUS HQ.

First impressions
Stepping out of the elevators, a visitor to SIRIUS headquarters walks through a set of glass doors into a large reception atrium. To the left of the front desk is the Main Performance Studio, while to the right is the futuristic Control Center. A flight of stairs just off the waiting area leads to offices directly overhead. Unlike your typical corporate HQ, where everyone's hidden behind cramped cubicle walls, the SIRIUS offices are full of glass and light. The effect is one of transparency and openness.

The SIRIUS Control Center.

Control and command
The SIRIUS Control Center is clearly meant to impress. Two "rocket scientists" (literally) sit behind a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that must be at least 25 feet high. They face a huge screen on the opposite wall — as tall as the ceiling — that tracks the orbits of the three SIRIUS satellites on their elliptical journey above the Western Hemisphere. The technicians monitor the flight paths of the satellites, and also relay commands to subscribers' radios to initiate service.

SIRIUS' three satellites are tracked on this giant screen in the Control Center.

The "hand-off"
There are two SIRIUS satellites in orbit directly over North America at any one time; a third satellite is always somewhere over South America, completing the bottom-half of the figure eight elliptical orbit. The area covered by the two satellites over North America is depicted on the map in yellow shading.

As one satellite begins its southward trajectory and "sets" below the equator, the third satellite "rises" and crests the Equator. Because the satellites do not broadcast signal below the equator, the signal has to be "handed-off" at the equator — the setting satellite stops transmitting the signal just as the rising satellite begins, ensuring an uninterrupted broadcast.

The advantage of SIRIUS' three-satellite system is that it allows for the two birds over the U.S. to maintain a high-angle orbit. This means the signal has relatively little problem negotiating tall buildings and natural obstacles like mountains. SIRIUS has a network of 90 terrestrial repeaters throughout the country that boost the signal in urban and mountainous areas, guaranteeing superb nationwide reception.

Uplink
While all the SIRIUS stream programming and digital file storage takes place in the headquarters, the signals are actually uplinked to the satellites from a facility across the Hudson River, in New Jersey. The two offices are connected via fiber optic cables and microwave transmission.

The Main Performance Studio is backlit with a night scene of the Manhattan skyline.

Main Performance Studio
The Main Performance Studio at SIRIUS flanks the left side of the entry hall. Glass again dominates the architectural layout: an outer layer of glass traps dead air between it and the interior glass wall, providing a neutral acoustic barrier that eliminates any sonic bleed-through into the reception area or the surrounding studios. The interior glass wall is canted at a 15? angle for better sonic reflection. Visitors and employees can watch artists performing live shows from the waiting room.

A glimpse of two of SIRIUS' thirty-three state-of-the-art Production Studios.

Production Studios
Down the hall past the Main Performance Studio is the first of thirty-three Production Studios, where stream designers host programs, interview artists, and feature live performances. The studios are connected to the digital music library via fiber optic cable, so a designer can program his or her stream from any of the studios. The layout of the studios is governed by the philosophy of making things as convenient and cost-effective as possible. As Mark Kalman explained, "When your facility is built around an automation environment, you can do things that you used to have to do in studios, at your desktop."

Rich McLaughlin, Programming Coordinator for SIRIUS' Left of Center stream, at work in a Production Studio.

Left of Center
We stopped in to visit with one of the programming coordinators, Rich McLaughlin, who was working on his playlist for "Left of Center," SIRIUS' indie, underground, and unsigned artists stream. Rich allowed us behind the control board and showed us the tools he uses to craft a playlist. The programmers use a software program called Selector to create the playlist from the over 2 million pieces of music in the library. Another program called PROPHET, is used to edit the shows and to splice in talk time and SIRIUS promos. The software programs and the ability to use any of the studios to work on a show allow programmers like Rich the ability to create a six-hour show in about forty-five minutes!

Rich demonstrated some of the sophisticated software programs he uses to compile playlists and edit his show.

Desktop studios
Every designer has a workstation space at SIRIUS. These modular desks include all the tools and equipment a stream designer needs to create most show programming, including fiber-optic connections to the on-air system and the digital library. The idea is that the majority of work can be done outside the studio, and in New York City, where real estate is anything but cheap, you can imagine how cost-effective the flexibility of SIRIUS' digital workstations are. You can do anything you can do in the studio, at your desk, except record a live performance. We visited briefly with Howard Marcus, a programming coordinator for Octane (Modern Rock). Howard explained to us how he produces the "Octane Music Minute," a news promo, right at his workstation.

A Stream designer can do 90% of his/her work right at the comprehensive desktop studio.

Sub-systems monitoring
This room is like a mini-version of the control room. It is used to monitor the digital uplink of programming signals to the satellites and to verify signals transmitted to the terrestrial repeater network by two satellite dishes on the roof. Everything is wired to an alarm, so the operator can be away from the desk (assisting with recording sessions, studio repair/maintenance, etc.) without having to sit around and wait for something to go wrong.

The digital uplink signals are monitored from this station. The operator on-duty wears a pager that alerts him/her if anything goes wrong.

Server room
We ended our tour in what is both literally and figuratively the core of SIRIUS HQ, the climate-controlled server.

Racks of digital satellite receivers bring in outside programming, such as NBA games, for SIRIUS' sports, news, and entertainment channels.

"This is really the heart of SIRIUS satellite radio," Mark Kalman explained. "Every piece of audio that goes on the air passes through these [machines] in one form or another."

Digital interconnects from all the in-house studios are integrated in the server room. Outside programming content, such as NBA games, NPR broadcasting, and Discovery Channel Radio are also routed here and integrated into the system.

Enough music for a lifetime! The servers that store SIRIUS' 1 million-title digital music library.

The audio servers that contain SIRIUS' 1 million-title digital music library are also in this room. There is one audio server for each stream. Adding titles to the library is easy — a CD can be "ripped" to a server in about 45 seconds. The automated system accesses the CDDB database on the web to grab the title, artist, track information for each album. As you would expect, there are multiple levels of redundancy built-in to the system. There is no single point of failure. Each primary server has a "hot" back-up, ready to step in and take over the digital transmission at the first sign of trouble. At any one time there are typically about 100,000 music titles loaded up and available to be played over the air.

Audio processors fine-tune the tone of the channels, for ideal playback.

In addition to the servers themselves, this room also houses the audio level monitoring system and audio dynamics processing section. Each stream of music, talk, or news can be fine-tuned for volume and tone.

S>Plex, statistical multi-plexing, is handled by these custom-built processors by Lucent Technologies.

S>Plex
Down another row of equipment is where SIRIUS' much-touted (S>Plex) Statistical Multiplexing takes place in yet another bank of 132 Digital Signal Processors that constantly and instantaneously evaluate the bandwidth required by the digital content on each and every stream. If one stream is playing a large, complex music file, the S>Plex technology will "borrow" bandwidth from a stream carrying less content — a talk show for example. By instantaneously managing bandwidth among all the channels, music files do not get clipped or compressed, so that sound quality remains high. Because this technology has never been used before, Kalman told us that they are always tweaking the system.

"The audio quality that was on the air six months ago, a year ago, is not even close to what's on the air now. We're constantly upgrading," Kalman said.

CD-quality vs. Content Delivery
I came away from my tour of SIRIUS HQ impressed by the technological sophistication of the facilities and envious of the nice view they enjoy of midtown Manhattan. But I was equally intrigued by the enthusiasm and dedication of the people I met — the stream designers and marketing analysts at SIRIUS believe they're working on the cutting edge of a cultural, and not just technological, phenomenon.

Mark Kalman summed it up this way: "The compelling thing about satellite radio to my mind is not necessarily that you're striving for CD-quality, because, to my way of thinking, once you put it through a processor, you're not getting CD-quality. What's compelling about the service is the content. We strive to give you the best content at the highest possible quality, while giving you a variety of programming. You put that all together, and we think that we have a very compelling offering at $12.95. We all have to keep in mind...that all this whiz-bang equipment is a means to an end — to get this wonderful product out in the marketplace, and I'm sold on it."