Etta Singh-Hartley — the broadcast bus, ground-loop-clean.

Belmont, NPR Music, then the shop

She came out of Vanderbilt in 2014 with a BSc in physics and no clear next step. The audio-engineering certificate at Belmont was a one-year program she enrolled in mostly because the work seemed adjacent to the physics she liked. The Belmont program was where she met Antonia Hodges, who at the time was running the field-recording crew for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk series. Antonia hired Etta as a contract field engineer in 2017; over the next three years they recorded sixty-eight Tiny Desk Field Recordings together — small venues, intimate setups, the sort of sessions where audio quality is the entire reason the show exists.

The pivot to the power side came in 2020. Etta had been reading the ground-audit literature (IEEE 1100, the Emerald Book, mostly), and she had been increasingly frustrated by the field-recording sessions where the audio bus picked up 60-Hz hum from venue grounding that nobody was responsible for fixing. She called Raylene on the recommendation of a Belmont classmate; the shop hired her in 2020 on a part-time basis and offered her a worker-owner buy-in in 2021. She did the buy-in.

The Jensen kits

Etta builds Jensen-transformer kits in the bay on slow Tuesday afternoons. The kits are not commercial — she builds them for crew use, mostly for shop inventory replenishment, occasionally as gifts for Belmont audio-engineering students who can use them. The kit is a Jensen JT-MB-D differential transformer in a sealed Pelican Micro box, wired to two female XLR connectors with internal shield grounded to the box, with a removable ground-lift switch on the back for the times when you need to lift the secondary ground to break a ground loop.

She has built thirty-eight kits. Seventeen live in the bay, six are out on long-term loan to Belmont, four live in the trucks for Tiny Desk emergencies, and the rest are with various Nashville audio engineers. The build cost is $284 in parts; she does not bill her time.

The Tiny Desk practice

Etta is the shop’s lead on every NPR Music Tiny Desk Field Recording session that hits Nashville, which has been six in 2025 and three so far in 2026. The shop’s relationship with NPR Music is older than Etta’s tenure at the shop — Raylene had worked with the NPR audio crew during her NEP days — but Etta has deepened it. She has a standing invitation to Antonia’s annual NPR field-recording retreat in Catalina, which she has declined twice and finally accepted for 2027.

Outside the bay

Etta lives in 12 South with her partner (an environmental engineer at TDEC). She reads physics papers on her Kindle on the WeGo Route 23 bus to and from the bay (twenty-eight minutes each way; the bus is reliable). She runs the loop around Centennial Park on Saturday mornings. She is the shop’s coffee buyer (Sea Salt Coffee on Trinity Lane; the espresso machine in the bay kitchen was a 2024 birthday gift from Marcus and Raylene jointly).

How to reach her

For broadcast remote work and any audio-iso question, email etta@briley-stage.example. She reads it most evenings; reply latency is typically twelve hours. For Tiny Desk Field Recording bookings, she also coordinates through the NPR Music production team.