Doing a keynote about broadcast automation. And, as usual, YouTube comes up with the goods that stations have designated to the dump.
In the old days, announcers would play their own jingles. Remember WEAF in New York? Er no, neither do I. Then the American network NBC automated the chimes in what was called the Rangertone Chimeless Chimes. Only a handful of these left on the planet.
And then came the cart machine with its endless loop of tape and a self cueing device. Plug in and play....
Used to use these at Radio Netherlands in the 1980's. The carillon bells at the start of the broadcast would wow all over the place....
In the old days, announcers would play their own jingles. Remember WEAF in New York? Er no, neither do I. Then the American network NBC automated the chimes in what was called the Rangertone Chimeless Chimes. Only a handful of these left on the planet.
And then came the cart machine with its endless loop of tape and a self cueing device. Plug in and play....
Used to use these at Radio Netherlands in the 1980's. The carillon bells at the start of the broadcast would wow all over the place....
Used ITC then Pacific Recorders in the day..the Pacific Recorders cart machines never wowed..the itc's always did
ReplyDeleteabout WEAF better known as 66 W NBC...now WFAN all sports
ReplyDeleteThe call are popularly thought to have stood for Western Electric AT&T Fone or Water, Earth, Air, and Fire (the 4 classical elements).[1] However, records suggest that the call letters were assigned from an alphabetical sequence. The first assigned call was actually WDAM; it was quickly dropped, but presumably came from the same alphabetical sequence.
In 1922, WEAF broadcast what it later claimed to be the first radio advertisement (actually a roughly 10-minute long talk anticipating today's radio and television infomercials) which promoted an apartment development in Jackson Heights near a new elevated train line, (the IRT's Flushing-Corona line, now the number 7 line).[2]
In 1926, WEAF was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America, making it a sister station to WJZ. RCA then formed the National Broadcasting Company, which operated two radio chains. WEAF became the flagship station of the NBC Red Network. The other chain was the NBC Blue Network, whose programming originated at WJZ (now WABC), also owned by RCA. As a result of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement of 1941, WEAF became a clear channel station, and could be heard across most of the eastern half of North America at night.
Alex from Germany sent me an e-mail asking to repost this:
ReplyDeleteIt was around 1977, I think, when I visited the broadcasting centre of Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt/Main, in what was then West Germany. Their interval signal came from a standard turntable used for vinyl records. They had wound standard magnetic tape around the outside of the turntable. They put a playback tape-recorder head near the turntable. Clever.