Bill Spurlin (broadcast engineer)

William J. "Bill" Spurlin is an American broadcast engineer who worked in Boston radio from the 1970s into the 1990s. Trade magazines of the 1980s and early 1990s record his work on sending live concerts digitally and on early plans for digital audio broadcasting (DAB). No source links him to the literary scholar William J. Spurlin, and they appear to be different people.

WBCN

Spurlin's blog has a series of posts called "Reminiscences of WBCN, 1971-72". In the first of them he writes that in January 1971 he applied for an engineer's job at WBCN, Boston's progressive rock station, after earning an FCC First Class Radiotelephone License, and that the general manager, Arnie "Woo-Woo" Ginsburg, hired him.^[1] In 2011 the radio journalist Scott Fybush wrote on the Boston Radio Interest mailing list that Spurlin had been WBCN's chief engineer in 1971–72, when the station was moving from the old Hancock tower to the Prudential Center.^[2] Another post on the blog tells the history of the Concert Network, the chain of FM stations that gave WBCN its call letters.^[3] Commenting on the blog in 2013, the WBCN disc jockey Charles Laquidara recalled an incident from what he called the "pre-Bill Spurlin era".^[4] The makers of the documentary WBCN and the American Revolution name Bill Spurlin among the people who lent archival material to the film.^[5]

WGBH-FM

By 1985 Spurlin was engineer in charge of maintenance and transmission at WGBH-FM, the Boston public radio station. In the November/December 1985 issue of dB magazine, he and WGBH Radio's operations director, John Voci, wrote about a Halloween concert by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande at MIT's Kresge Auditorium. WGBH sent the concert digitally, using dbx Model 700 processors, to public radio stations in nine cities. The article called it the first live direct-to-local-station digital audio broadcast in the United States.^[6] The magazine's index for 1986 lists a second article by the two men, "WGBH: Digital Transmission/Boston to Tokyo".^[7] In a June 1987 article for Radio World, Spurlin wrote that WGBH had used the dbx 700 for five years to carry live Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, and had used a Sony 1630 processor with FM Tokyo to broadcast a live Boston Symphony concert in Japan.^[8]

The Christian Science Monitor and digital radio

By 1990 Spurlin worked for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston. He gave a paper called "Rate-Reduced Digital Audio in the Broadcast Environment" at the 1990 NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference.^[9] At the 1991 conference he presented "An Object-Oriented Network Automation System". The paper describes the Monitor's automated news and public affairs radio network, which could feed as many as ten programs at once by satellite to FM, AM and shortwave stations.^[10][11] Broadcast Engineering's preview of the 1991 conference also listed a paper on multipath cancellation for digital audio broadcasting by Edward A. Schober and William J. Spurlin.^[12]

In October 1991 Radio World named Schober, Spurlin and Peter Moncure as the principals of American Digital Radio (ADR), a company in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, that was developing an in-band digital radio system called ADR 2000. The magazine described Spurlin as a technical manager at the Monitor with "extensive experience with audio source coding techniques". It added that he had carried out some of the original DAB experiments, using wideband PCM, at WGBX-TV in Boston.^[13] In his paper in the 1991 NAB proceedings, Schober described the DAB system that he, Spurlin and Moncure were developing as a spread-spectrum system.^[10]

Identification

The trade articles about WGBH and the Monitor do not mention WBCN, and the blog posts read for this entry do not mention WGBH. A 2016 comment on the blog connects them: a reader who had been a college DJ in Boston wrote that he later became an engineer and had worked with the blog's author at WGBH.^[4]