J.C. Monahan to jump from Channel 5 to NBC Boston

I've always thought that NECN and now NBC Boston sound like their studio is a giant bathroom with that slight but strange echo.

This is not unique to this station. Any station using a satellite relay, regardless if it is across the globe or across town, will experience this delay. It's built in to the system.

We may think that radio and TV signals travel at the speed of light. They do, but each time they pass through a mechanical device there is a lag and when you pass through several systems the lag becomes noticeable.

Watch any network live link via satellite and you will see the same thing.

Some stations try to compensate for this by having buzz phrases that each end of the broadcast will recognize so they can start speaking in response quicker, essentially talking over the last few words of a transmission but sometimes that fails. Sort of funny when it does.

Here's an experiment. Tune to any channel on cable in one room, then tune to the same station on broadcast (over the air) in another, and stand between them. you will hear the station echo because the signals arrive at different points in time. This is the lag caused by satellite relay to the cable systems.