Post by Travis on Jul 31, 2005 19:59:12 GMT -5
If you were a participant on the Mason Dixon Line, or the phone-in talk shows that followed, you may find this interesting. Then again... Well...
During the early '70s, WAKY had 5 Criterion brand cart machines in the control room as well as a Spotmaster which sat on top of the automated request line which was merely a Code-A-Phone telephone answering machine. There are several images of the Criterions, the Spotmaster and the Code-A-Phone on this site taken from different angles.
When I first began playing around with the Criterion cart machines on Sunday mornings (the control room was off the air while public affairs programming ran from a back production room) I wondered why the slots were so big for such small cartridges. I would later learn that the carts were available in different sizes and the slot could accommodate them all.
One of the answers came when I saw the cartridge that was loaded in the Spotmaster. It was an unusually large cartridge and was even more unusual because it had a clear plastic top which revealed a series of gears and wheels inside the actual cartridge. This was the delay cartridge which had been used to create a 7 second, or more, delay in audio during the Mason Dixon Line and other telephone call-in talk shows that followed.
The cartridge worked by routing a continuous loop of tape around a series of wheels & curves in such a way that anything going onto the tape, from the record head, would literally be given the runaround taking 7 to 11 seconds to eventually reach the playback head and go out on the air.
If a caller were to say "@@#$%" or "##&%$" or that the jock's mother was "%$#@##!" or that WKLO ROCKS!!, the host would have 7 seconds or so to pot down the Spotmaster before the offensive language reached the playback head and went out over the air. I'm guessing that potting down the output of the cart would do it, but I'm not really sure what Mason, Mike Griffin and others actually did in this case.
Unfortunately, the delay cartridge could be quite muddy in sound (when it was actually working) and even the Marti dynamic presence equalizer could not clean it up enough to really sound good on the air. When I was a participant on the Mason Dixon Line, during '71 and '72, Mason seldom used the cart at all because it simply did not work. I got to where I would just lower my radio volume enough to avoid feedback on the air, hold my phone receiver upside down to speak into it like a microphone and just listen to Mason's reply on the air.
The biggest problem I can recall is that the machine would often fail to erase the tape after it had passed over the playback head. This resulted in another caller's (or even the same caller's) recording getting mixed with the previous loop recording, playing together at the playback head and then adding another recording to those recordings and continuing until it sounded as if 20 people were all having phone conversations over the air at the same time. Mason would then stop the delay cart and continue LIVE.
While there are no photos on this site that clearly show the inner workings of the dreaded delay cartridge, the cartridge can be seen loaded in the Spotmaster in many of the control room photos. You'll note that it's a much larger cartridge than the standard ones that resembled the even more dreaded 8-track cartridges that we all loved to hate during the 1970s.
I don't know if Milton Metz had this kind of trouble with the delay system on his WHAS talk show, but I do recall that there was much rejoicing when a company finally introduced a solid-state digital delay system to replace the dreaded mechanical delay cartridges. But, does anyone know if WAKY ever got one?
During the early '70s, WAKY had 5 Criterion brand cart machines in the control room as well as a Spotmaster which sat on top of the automated request line which was merely a Code-A-Phone telephone answering machine. There are several images of the Criterions, the Spotmaster and the Code-A-Phone on this site taken from different angles.
When I first began playing around with the Criterion cart machines on Sunday mornings (the control room was off the air while public affairs programming ran from a back production room) I wondered why the slots were so big for such small cartridges. I would later learn that the carts were available in different sizes and the slot could accommodate them all.
One of the answers came when I saw the cartridge that was loaded in the Spotmaster. It was an unusually large cartridge and was even more unusual because it had a clear plastic top which revealed a series of gears and wheels inside the actual cartridge. This was the delay cartridge which had been used to create a 7 second, or more, delay in audio during the Mason Dixon Line and other telephone call-in talk shows that followed.
The cartridge worked by routing a continuous loop of tape around a series of wheels & curves in such a way that anything going onto the tape, from the record head, would literally be given the runaround taking 7 to 11 seconds to eventually reach the playback head and go out on the air.
If a caller were to say "@@#$%" or "##&%$" or that the jock's mother was "%$#@##!" or that WKLO ROCKS!!, the host would have 7 seconds or so to pot down the Spotmaster before the offensive language reached the playback head and went out over the air. I'm guessing that potting down the output of the cart would do it, but I'm not really sure what Mason, Mike Griffin and others actually did in this case.
Unfortunately, the delay cartridge could be quite muddy in sound (when it was actually working) and even the Marti dynamic presence equalizer could not clean it up enough to really sound good on the air. When I was a participant on the Mason Dixon Line, during '71 and '72, Mason seldom used the cart at all because it simply did not work. I got to where I would just lower my radio volume enough to avoid feedback on the air, hold my phone receiver upside down to speak into it like a microphone and just listen to Mason's reply on the air.
The biggest problem I can recall is that the machine would often fail to erase the tape after it had passed over the playback head. This resulted in another caller's (or even the same caller's) recording getting mixed with the previous loop recording, playing together at the playback head and then adding another recording to those recordings and continuing until it sounded as if 20 people were all having phone conversations over the air at the same time. Mason would then stop the delay cart and continue LIVE.
While there are no photos on this site that clearly show the inner workings of the dreaded delay cartridge, the cartridge can be seen loaded in the Spotmaster in many of the control room photos. You'll note that it's a much larger cartridge than the standard ones that resembled the even more dreaded 8-track cartridges that we all loved to hate during the 1970s.
I don't know if Milton Metz had this kind of trouble with the delay system on his WHAS talk show, but I do recall that there was much rejoicing when a company finally introduced a solid-state digital delay system to replace the dreaded mechanical delay cartridges. But, does anyone know if WAKY ever got one?