A Very Rare piece of British Broadcasting history.

Cubicle DK4/19 mono mixing desk, 8x4ft complete wooden desk surround with 9x faders & fader channel controls, monitoring panel, tape, control & source selection.

desk from The World Service studio S35 at Bush House, London.

This desk was the 1st DK4/19 to be made and the prototype and was the last to broadcast from bush house.

The DK4/19 was state-of-the-art, but there was a variety of equipment in use at that time. Much of it hadn't changed since the early 1950s and Type B desks were widely used right up until the end of the 2012

The desk was entirely designed and built by the BBC in West London in the days before it either bought mixers off the shelf or gave a specification to a manufacturer (e.g. Calrec, Neve, Audix) and let them build it. DK is the BBC 'product' code for a mixing DesK.

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11th Oct 2012 after that it would need to be picked up from Birmingham.

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Here are some memories of the desk from a BBC studio engineer I found on line..

we arrived at Bush house for the start of our on-station training, we were relieved and delighted to be introduced to the DK4/19 - the SMs' desk.

 This desk was hugely popular with SMs as it was truly a 'transmission' desk. It had just the facilities that were needed, nothing superfluous. And it was partly designed by SMs at Bush House. There are many of these desks still in use in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century.

 The DK4/19 was perhaps the first ever 'assignable' desk. At the top of the nine channels there was a large selector knob. You just had to turn this to route the source to the channel. You could choose from the two microphones (both STC4038s, of course!), common tapes, individual tapes, grams and up to four outside sources (switched to the studio by the control room - no routers in those days). Only one studio (S8) had that new-fangled machine, the Compact Disc Player.

Each channel could be routed to one of two RSAs (Response Selection Amplifiers - i.e. equalisation) with a basic treble and bass response.

 The faders worked in the BBC manner - open towards the operator - and each channel had a green light/fader switch. The Cue Programme/Clean Feed switching was achieved in modules to the right of the desk, which also allowed 'Tone to CF' and 'Talkback on CF'.

In the centre of the desk were the monitoring controls: two 24-way switches to accommodate the vast number of Bush House networks, all colour-coded. It was very easy to be one point out between the studio ringmain and the cubicle ringmain causing much confusion in the studio! There was no balance control - this was strictly a mono environment - and monitoring was on a single LS5/8.

 There were two facilities that were unique to Bush House. Firstly the 'Auto PTT' - or Pre-Transmission Test. At ten minutes before transmission the computer in Control Room would signal the PTT modules in the studio and a light would indicate the network that was ready for transmission. The SM would press the button to indicate that the studio was ready to work to that network, and the desk would send line-up tone. If the button hadn't been pressed with five minutes to go, an alarm would sound in Control Room and the DOM (Duty Operations Manager) would be alerted to go and find the sleeping SM!

 And secondly, a module marked 'Int Sig' for Interval Signal. All international broadcasters use interval signals. This is a short musical loop that is transmitted on the appropriate short-wave frequency prior to transmission to help the listener tune-in correctly. It is also used in an emergency to sustain the frequency if there is a loss of audio. In Bush House there was a choice of 'V', based on the Morse Code for that letter (di-di-di-dah), a left-over from the 'V-for-Victory' campaign during the second world war. This was used for transmissions within Europe. Elsewhere the signal was a tuneful 'Bee Bee Cee'.

 Finally on the desk was the all-important 'Cubicle Announce' switch. In those days all were required to be 'vocal' SMs. We were all given a voice test to ensure we were suitable for making the opening announcements at the start of the language transmissions. One that springs to mind is "This is London calling Latin America with our programmes in Spanish". The problem was that this key was a latching switch, so if you didn't keep your finger on the button while announcing it was easy to forget to un-latch it. This meant you were left with no cubicle monitoring - and any dumbfounded mumbling would be broadcast around the world while you worked out what was going on!