[BC] Re: Secondary & Tertiary Tone

[Mark Croom]

I had ONE in a newsroom (circa 1991) and it was entertaining to keep it
running well. Those 3M carts didn't work very well in it except for the
shortest lengths, when they were new. Soon as the pulling tension started to
increase they had problems. We did basically only voice cuts on the thing so
it wasn't as fussy as something running music. We mostly had Audiopak carts
and they seemed to remain more consistent in that type of machine.

Those were the days, baby. Digital systems were just starting to make their
way into stations like ours at that point, and we were nowhere near even
doing digital audio editing. The AM side of the operation had a "Digital DJ"
from The Management living in its automation system; we installed it to
replace some very cantankerous SMC Carousels. Imagine dealing with the
50-something AM Operations guy who didn't really get any say in the project,
other than to learn that he was going to have to dub in the station's
production and maintain the library. WOW that was not good (he was a
forceful ex-military guy).

But both he and I lived to tell about it, and it wasn't 5 years later they
were a FULLY integrated digital facility with three stations running Enco (I
was only there for 13 fateful months).

The next place I worked didn't go fully digital until 2000. At least I
didn't have any Rapid-Q machines there  ;-)

Mark
MN

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Peter Smerdon <psmerdon at fastmail.com.au>wrote:

> Yep - remember them well.
> We had a bunch of them in newsroom, where the quick recueing of carts was a
> real boon - though some of the Fidelipac (Fiddlypac) carts would really
> rattle in fast forward. Soon moved to quieter Audiopaks.
>
> However their audio performance left something to be desired.
> That was a real problem at a time (in Australia), when we had annual
> engineering inspections by the Govt regulator - where they did audio
> performance tests on most station gear.
> The RapidQ's could barely meet the required spec in S/N (<-50dB wrt peak
> flux)and Wow & Flutter (<0.2% unwtd RMS - remember W&F?).
> I recall the FCC's specs were less onerous than ours, which ocassionally
> caused a problem with equipment imported from the US.
>