[BC] Why FM took off in the 70 s

[Bob Foxworth]

This is from a couple of weeks ago. 01 Nov.  I am going through
some old digests I had set aside to read. Just now getting
around to posting about this.


> > >As far as I know WABC as a Top 40 station always worked with the
announcer
> > >and engineer in the same room facing each other. The time I first
visited,
> > >they were still in old radio theater studios where the old drams
were
> > >produced. They had two desks facing each other in a room that was
nearly
> > >the size of a TV studio and nearly 2 floor high. There was actually
a
> > >'real' control room that over looked the space and dated back to
the time
> > >of those dramas.

This would have been 39 West 66 Street. The NABET techs would have
been assigned at random to network, or to "local radio" (WABC AM) and
we might have gotten both during any day. WABC was on the 6th
floor. The tech sat between two "walls" of cart machines, had a board
of lever switches in front of him, slide faders. A table for the air
talent and
another for the staff announcer, with boom mics.

I think this was a temporary arragement being used at the time I started
there. NABET used summer relief engineers so all the permanent
people could have a "real" vacation. These were typically college guys.
(In contrast, IBEW 1212 at CBS did not use summer techs and
vacations would span the entire year)

At 39 West, in the basement was "transmission", there was a net
production studio on 2, I think the newsroom was on 3, the Audio
Transcription Room (ATR) was on 4 along with the Cosell studio and
a studio where Koppel would do his "flair reports" pieces on weekends.
Can't remember what was on 5, misc studios, but local WABC was on 6.
They had a glass-windowed control room, but all the work was done in
the big studio room, in the ad-hoc studio. This was in 1964 and also in
63
when I first visited there.

Breakfast Club with Don McNeill was taped and re-fed from ATR.
They used two Ampex 300's rolling in parallel, one was deadpot and
served as a backup to the air feed.

The next year, or in '66, local had moved to 1926 Broadway and had a
very nice new facility. The tech and anncr sat facing each other, close
enough to hand carts back and forth. The tech had a shallow sloping
in-house-made panel with lighted push buttons, and slide faders
mounted nearby. No one needed headphones. Everything was cart,
and there were rotating cart racks behind the air talent with all the
music,
and promos/jingles,and the same racks behind the tech with all the
spots.

When in 1926 Bway there were big glass windows where tours
could be brought in and Wally Schwartz said everyone had to
wear jacket and tie when working on air. Not terribly well thought
of by some of us, then. The cart machines were mounted mostly
below tabletop level on either side along with the xmtr remote control
unit, that is, near your knees..

Typically the talent would assemble a list of all items in sequence
(spots, jingles etc) between each record and the tech would load them
up in the cart machines and play them on cue in sequence. Dan Ingram
was the most professional air talent and with a half decent tech could
get some really good production values. The better techs knew the
music and were able to do some good fade effects for talkovers by
the air talent. Easy to do on the slide pots.

The lineup in 64 was HOA, Dayton, Ingram, Muni, Morrow, Lewis,
generally, sometimes Charlie Greer. As I recall HOA was the only
one who still used an on-air  producer then.

By far the worst cart problem I recall was poor tape tracking
over the PB head and sometimes putting a pencil underneath
the cart as it played would crispen up the audio a bit. Some of
the problems were just operational error. The ability of the techs
varied widely and those who could do good tight production
found semi-regular assignments, to the relief of those who did not
want to "participate". These cart machines were in 19 inch panels
and had big mouths, the carts were fidelipacs,

Bob-a-Loo (Bob Lewis) was one for having the tech stop and
start the cart for voice inserts and this had to be done while
holding hands on the 2 buttons and turning sideways to
watch him for cues. There were maybe eight cart machines
and if the tech picked one that was hard to reach, it became
tricky. And of course this was when there were millions of
skywave listeners. These were probably some of the "errors"
you all heard.


> > >Here are some links to some of the various configurations they had
over
> > >the years.
> >
> >
> >Did I miss something, or were there NO faders on the console?  It
looked
> >like just switches.  Since all elements were on cart, were all levels
> >pre-set?  Given the reliability (lack of) of cart machines of that
era, it
> >must have been a maintenance nightmare.  Were there any other
stations that
> >played music from carts that early?  I don't remember ever seeing it
until
> >the early 70s.


For a while they experimented with the Ampex disc player, a truly
floppy disc of magnetic material about the size of a LP record. They
were awkward to load and the access time made them not suitable
for rapid production values when quick access was wanted.


> I remember hearing the occasion on-air cart jam on WABC in the mid
'60s,
> either slow-downs or out-and-out stoppages. The jocks were usually
right on
> top it in terms of turning it into entertainment. Meanwhile, the
station
> always recovered from it very quickly, usually by going to a jingle
and
> then back to normal program material. I don't remember if they
returned to
> the same song, but I believe that they had duplicate carts available
for
> all program material.
>
> Bob Orban


I don't recall many outright cart failures but yes it was easy enough
to keep something rolling. One of the  "issues" was knowing when
the talent wanted the mic turned on or off. Never had this problem
with Ingram, though. He was good. Usually we learned the jock's
style so well that this was not a real problem.

Before wrapping this up I have to mention "fadeouts" which some of
you might find bizarre. It was a method of maintaining a sense of net
system time. Because no one had any really accurate clocks, we
had mechanical dial clocks (if the Western Union clocks were not
present) and there was a toggle switch on the board that let us
listen to WWV audio. We could tweak the clock to match WWV time, then
would break out of the background "fill" music (played out of ATR)
at say 59:23 and play a 7-second jingle "dah-du-didedede-deet - this is
the ABC Radio Network" which would end at exactly 59:30. This was
done in a studio on 5 and a tech and producer were assigned. Then
we would "drop channels" during that 30 second dead-air time and the
newsroom would pickup & originate at 00:00. The guy in "transmission"
would preset the next on-air studio to "take air" when the current
studio would "drop". This was on the net, of course. Sometimes
the fadeout and drop weren't done and the guy in xmsn would
have to force the drop, sometimes quickly.

The problem with the W-U clocks is that they would reset on
the hour and by the time 59:xx rolled around they couldn't
be relied on to be exact.

I never found out if there was really anyone listening downline
at the affiliates to our system cue fadeouts, which were scheduled
events to be covered..

By 1966 or 1967 WABC had gotten a bunch of electromechanical
"digital" clocks with "pages" that would turn to reveal the printed
numbers, driven by electrical impulse. Keeping them sync'ed
was a problem. I remember once in some sort of pickup during
an election coverage (?) when the clatter of several clocks at once
could be heard in the background, the pgm coming from a big studio.

Hope this is of some interest.

- Bob