[BC] Re:The telephone recording beep

[k7cr]

When I got into this biz, back in the late 50's, we had to deal with the 
(singular) telephone company and they, in conjunction with the Feds, had a 
ton of rules regarding interconnecting telephones and broadcast stations. 
Back then we used the old WE 50B Recorder Connector.   if I recall.  They 
did have the anoying periodic beep.    A few folks (no names please) found a 
way to defeat the beep mechanically when it was discovered that the beep 
occured when a relay pulled in....A pieced of cardboard from a match book 
cover took care of that.  Later they came out with a new solid-state model. 
This still had the beep, but also had a notch-filter that greatly attenuated 
the beep on the audio output.   All I remember about this was that it was 
the same size as the old 50B's and had a cannon connector from where you got 
program audio.

Doing live telephone work in those days was very crude. The problem was how 
to get the caller to hear the announcer and yet not have the announcers 
voice come back through the telephone and back out the recorder connector 
and on the air.  The solution was to simply lay the handset on the surface 
in front of the announcer so the caller could hear them without making the 
announcers voice sound wierd.

Remember, in those days, it was a crime to tamper with the telephone.   You 
had to have a 'telephone-man' install everything in your studios and 
connecting anything to their system was termed a - foreign connection - and 
it would be removed and taken away if discovered.

A few folks (no names here) got wise to all of this and created their own 
hybrid based interconnection equipment or 'borrowed' the hybrid in a 
telephone that they happen to - find - somewhere.  In some cases, if you 
were lucky, the local telephone man would look the other way.

Clay Freinwald
(Getting old)