Carts as a piece of history

[firepoint525]

Had to do some searching to find this one, but there is an AM station (apparently a VERY small one!) that does an "8-track Thursday" every week. I have never listened to this, but it might be worth checking out. Judging by the photos, it probably resembles the very first stations that many of us once worked for!

http://q1520radio.com/

 

[jfrancispastirchak]

Had to do some searching to find this one, but there is an AM station (apparently a VERY small one!) that does an "8-track Thursday" every week. I have never listened to this, but it might be worth checking out. Judging by the photos, it probably resembles the very first stations that many of us once worked for!

http://q1520radio.com/

Hey, great link! Thanks for sending. Look closely; the website has an ad inviting experienced oldie's jocks to apply...

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Here is my contribution to the CART storybook.

I was working for a hodge-podge station. Owned by a company that was an early player in radio for the Black community. But in that era, they didn't think that community in our mid-western town was large enough to support a full schedule. Because of industrial jobs being available, we had a reasonalbe large Appalachian community also. So we signed on each day with country music, we had some kind of eclectic mid-day "hodge-podge" and then at 2 P.M. .... "Let The Show Begin!" Blues, Rock-n-Roll, Jazz. The works.

We had a new, young, clean-cut and mildly abrasive lad from Mississippi who wore his Southerners. on his shirt sleeve. Piercing, drilling-on-steel but pleasant voice. Not a big southern drawl. But a lot of Southern-isms. I was older than him and the other Southern presence in this Rust Belt market. We poked at each other with regularity.

I was strictly a sales rep at this station. But the G.M. knew I had a First Phone hidden away and so our engineer could have a couple of days off, I agreed to come baby-sit the transmitter readings. And our Mississippi Flash had the week-end off also. He had a lot of snappy stuff on carts and was meticulous in how they were labeled and organized. And following the top-of-the-hour network news, he had this sounder with a voice to make a wrestling announcer envy: [timpani roll] AND N-ow-wwww, It's JIM SMith... and moOOOORE MUSIC! and a bit more miscellaneour drum noises and what ever. I had way too much time on my hands.

From the country music side, there was a record in that era with two story-telling guys singing and talking about all-thumbs Mr. Fixit guy around the house. And in the record, one guy shouts out: "No! Don't touch those wires toget- - - - - ,<sounds of arcing electricity buzzing> silence, and then a female speaking with a twang that would make Loretta Lynn stand in envy: "Why-d awl the lights go owt?" a bit more silence, then the two country music guys sing the Mr. Handyman Chorus again.

I dubbed onto a reel of tape the top-of-the-hour show sounder. and right in the middle of "It's JIM SMith.. and ..... short silence... the sounds of arcing electricity buzzing... short silence... "Why-d awl the lights go owt?" and then the "and moOOOORE MUSIC!"

Put the mess on a blank CART. Put it in the well organized rack. Salted away the original CART.

Knowing Eagle-eye Smith might notice some little imperfection in my labeling of his cart, (which he did! ) I put the original sounder on, and then my butchered prank. Sure enough, come Monday he shows up for duty, does some desk work and some production and then goes in to do his show. He thinks he sees something out of place, plays the cart into the audition channel during the news and decides all is well. The news ends and THE WHOLE WORLD including one G.M. who runs the station like a little Army camp hears the mischief.

A couple of people put on a good show of pretending to be upset and bent out of shape... but we all survived.

Does radio today have room for that kind of crap? ;D

 

[jfrancispastirchak]

^^^

Re, Reply 42... As always, great story, ripe with facts sweetened by charming, homespun anecdotal tease. You've got to be related to George Gobel.

 

[jonbruce]

Munz made cars in Los Angeles too. Worked at a small station in 1966 that had one of those little jukebox things. We used it manually to hold the current hits of the day. Still troublesome even manually. A small FM station in the Los Angeles market actually used car 4 track units on the air. Right at the start of the audio the jock who recorded it would say "mark". The one air guy would have to pot down the thing after a spot played. He would hear the mark in que and stop the machine. This was at KSFV 106.3 in San Fernando, CA. The station eventually went broke and the freq. deleted.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

The four-track automobile carts were, for all intents and purposes, identical to the broadcast industry carts, with the exception of the tape speed, as noted in previous posts, and of course, the tape length load.

Sometime back in the early 1970s, I was trolling a K-Mart store and I saw they had a bin of discounted four-track tapes on sale. The majority of the tapes were consumer grade plastic, but a fair number were real Fidelipac tape carts, physically identical to those marketed to the broadcast industry.

I bought all the Fidelipac tapes I found and we used them in the station for years for longer carts.

I don't think I ever modified the tape load, except thinking about it now, I can't remember if any of them had a metal foil for the splice. If so, I suppose I did replace that splice. I timed them and marked them appropriately.

The K-Mart price was about 25% of the regular price of the carts to the broadcast industry, IIRC.

 

[joeybabe25]

In my years in radio, I do not think I ever saw a cart over 15 minutes. The sound on a hour cart must have been hidious.

Anything over 15 minutes we used reel to reel. Why use a cart when reel to reel is not that difficult. I know it may be easier, but even the worst am station should care about sound quality.

Or maybe not.

Joe

 

[jh]

In my years in radio, I do not think I ever saw a cart over 15 minutes. The sound on a hour cart must have been hidious.

Anything over 15 minutes we used reel to reel. Why use a cart when reel to reel is not that difficult. I know it may be easier, but even the worst am station should care about sound quality.

Or maybe not.

Joe

We had a few 30-minute carts, used not on the air but as emergency stand-by for a background music service run on our SCA. They were mono, two-track I think, sounded bad. We would put them on while rewinding the 14-inch, 3 3/4 ips tapes used for the service.

We used the same half-hour sized carts for time-announce for the automation system.

 

[davideduardo]

If you ever used a cart machine or had to do the tedious and frequent maintenance they required, you might like this piece of 1982 memorabilia: a full manual for the ubiquitous ITC Series 99 cart machine, complete with diagrams and schematics!

http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/ITC/ITC-99.pdf

 

[Darth_vader]

"The four-track carts were for all intents and purposes identical to the broadcast industry carts, with the exception of the tape speed (as noted in previous posts) and of course, the tape length load."

And the track configuration. As I understand, broadcast Fidelipack tapes are usually either two-track (mono+tone) or three-track (stereo+tone).

"I don't think I ever modified the tape load, except thinking about it now, I can't remember if any of them had a metal foil for the splice. If so, I suppose I did replace that splice. I timed them and marked them appropriately."

Contrary to what Wikipedia claims, later examples (particularly those released during the early 8-track era) do have foil splices, presumably to take advantage of the automatic switching on then-new 8-track machines. (Remember, Muntz tapes can be played on 8-track gear, with varying degrees of success, by snapping a pinch-roller "adaptor" into the hole or--dare I say it?--by moving the reel to a regular 8-track cartridge.) I'd guess that some very late-model 4-track equipment may have also followed 8-track's example and incorporated automatic switching, but all I've ever heard of/seen are the manual players.

 

[radiorob2.0]

When the transition from carts to hard drives happened I didn't want to give up carts. There was something about having the possibility of several audio sources on the air compared to the one sound card that was standard in the early days. Now that modern systems allow multiple sources on the air, carts can stay in the past.

If you're talking history how about the cart machine's predecessor, The MacKenzie Repeater.
http://www.reelradio.com/reports/mackenzi.html

Their comment section indicates CBS Television City used a MacKenzie Repeater for "The Price Is Right" sound effects and music beds until the nineties when digital instantaneous playback replaced the MacKenzie.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

And the track configuration. As I understand, broadcast Fidelipack tapes are usually either two-track (mono+tone) or three-track (stereo+tone).

Well, true enough, as recorded, but once the Fidelipac four track carts that I bought were bulk erased, they were physically the same as the broadcast market Fidelipac carts, except for the odd-ball tape lengths.

Yea, I should have caught the track configuration difference. Of course, after bulk erasing, even the speed difference was no longer a factor.

 

[davideduardo]

And the track configuration. As I understand, broadcast Fidelipack tapes are usually either two-track (mono+tone) or three-track (stereo+tone).

Carts are just a plastic box with quarter inch tape in them. That went for Fidelipacs, Scotch Carts or any others. Any format is determined by the recording device, not the tape.

In fact, there was a very successful line of cart machines called Tomcats from PRE that ran at 15 ips; it took a 7 minute cart to record a 3 1/2 minute song.

The original Spotmasters had a mono audio track and a cue track. When stereo came to be needed, the configuration was two audio tracks and a cue track.

I can't remember if any of them had a metal foil for the splice. If so, I suppose I did replace that splice. I timed them and marked them appropriately."

Broadcast carts did not have a metallic foil splice. They used plain splicing tape. Those of us who rewound or wound our own carts simply bought the special cart tape that had the right lubrication for the mobius loop, used a cart winding device with tape length measurement and spliced the same way we did with reel tape. Many of us used splice finders so we did not record over the splice; the trick was to start recording right after the splice.

 

[davideduardo]

If you're talking history how about the cart machine's predecessor, The MacKenzie Repeater.
http://www.reelradio.com/reports/mackenzi.html

We also had the Ampex CueMat introduced to a brief life in 1961 at KYA in San Francisco. The machines played what looked like 8" floppy disks without a sleeve... just a somewhat rigid round piece of recording tape.

http://www.recordist.com/ampex/ag100.html

And there was the Gates Spot Tape

http://mcnally.cc/spottape.htm

... which had a 13 inch wide piece of tape with 101 tracks, selected mechanically.

Both were designed to make engineers seek employment outside of radio.

 

[Darth_vader]

Rereading my last post I can see I wasn't entirely clear; I was specifically talking about the Muntz implementation of the broadcast cartridge. Yes, physically they were identical, despite very subtle differences between the consumer implementation and the broadcast implementation.

I also (apparently inappropriately) used the term "Fidelipac" as a generic term for carts, like I do "Ibiquity receiver" for any H-D radio receiver regardless of brand. A & M, however, apparently did use Fidelipac carts at one time, since my copy of "Herb Alpert's Ninth" (which has a foil splice) has the "TELEPRO/INDUSTRIES INCORPORATED/CHERRY HILL, N.J./FIDELIPAC(R) 005" branding moulded into the bottom half.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

Carts are just a plastic box with quarter inch tape in them. That went for Fidelipacs, Scotch Carts or any others. Any format is determined by the recording device, not the tape.

Very true. What I was intending to convey on the line of the 4 track consumer market carts was that most of the carts I saw in K-Mart many years back were more generic no-name plastic boxes, but maybe 1% of the carts were indeed Fidelipac carts, brand name, everything.

Broadcast carts did not have a metallic foil splice. They used plain splicing tape. Those of us who rewound or wound our own carts simply bought the special cart tape that had the right lubrication for the mobius loop, used a cart winding device with tape length measurement and spliced the same way we did with reel tape. Many of us used splice finders so we did not record over the splice; the trick was to start recording right after the splice.

Might have been true that the more expensive cart machines did use tone cueing, but the first cart machines we had in a station where I worked weekends, in the mid-1960s, a low budget operation, the first cart machines they had were no-name units which used the Viking “****-the-pinch-roller” decks and they did indeed use a strip of metallic foil to stop the machine on recue.

I have no idea where the machines came from, or who made them, but I think they were made in some low budget operation.

That might not have been the practice with the bigger companies, but the foil was in the carts, and the machines did not have tones.

I do hope you did not actually make a Mobius loop for your tape reloads. That won’t work. I am sure you really meant an endless loop.

I did finally work at a few locations which really had a Spotmaster tape rewinder, but for many years, I used a reel to reel deck and simply timed the tape load. Necessity is the mother of invention. National Audio and I were good friends, so to speak, as I bought a lot of tape and cart parts from them.

The Spotmaster 500/505 desk top cart machines, with the lift up lid, were a great splice finder. I had one station where the evening guy was the FM transmitter watcher, and one of his evening duties was to gather up all the pulled carts, bulk erase them and then use a Spotmaster to cycle the carts until the splice went by the heads.

 

[Savage]

Wow, in 47 years in this biz I thought I'd seen every kind of radio-studio gear including MacKenzie mags and the Ampex CueMat which David references - but I never, ever saw a cart machine using foil strips to stop the tape. The early Tapecasters were "generic" in appearance with no name on the cabinet, and very early Spotmasters had the ubiquitous Viking transport mounted in a wooden box, but they still cued the tape electronically, not electromechanically. There was also a kind of imitation-Tapecaster cart machine using the Viking transport made, IIRC, in Tennessee, the brand being "Telco." But it also used the 1 kHz cue tone on the alternate tape track.

Telco cart machines were mostly found in the south, although one appeared in 1969 in the production "studio" (closet) at WGMF Watkins Glen, NY - although the racing-fan owner also had WSEB in Sebring, FL, so the Telco probably migrated north through that affiliation.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

Wow, in 47 years in this biz I thought I'd seen every kind of radio-studio gear including MacKenzie mags and the Ampex CueMat which David references - but I never, ever saw a cart machine using foil strips to stop the tape. The early Tapecasters were "generic" in appearance with no name on the cabinet, and very early Spotmasters had the ubiquitous Viking transport mounted in a wooden box, but they still cued the tape electronically, not electromechanically. There was also a kind of imitation-Tapecaster cart machine using the Viking transport made, IIRC, in Tennessee, the brand being "Telco." But it also used the 1 kHz cue tone on the alternate tape track.

Telco cart machines were mostly found in the south, although one appeared in 1969 in the production "studio" (closet) at WGMF Watkins Glen, NY - although the racing-fan owner also had WSEB in Sebring, FL, so the Telco probably migrated north through that affiliation.

I have no idea what brand of machines they were, but I do know they did use the foil tape to stop.

This must have been about 1965 and it was in a station in east-central Georgia. Too bad the engineer who took care of the station is no longer with us, as I'd think nothing of calling him to see if he remembered where they came from.

All of the carts had the foil visible in the head window where the record head would normally go.

Could they have been Sparta Spot-O-Matics? I have no idea.

 

[Mike_Rafone]

That Godfrey show was recorded with "echo" and he said, in that drolling voice, "We're coming to you today from the basment furnace room …" The audio effect seemed to cover the poor quality of the long cart.

 

[joeybabe25]

In the 27 years (to the day) that Godfrey did his radio show on CBS, was it always fed live?

I know that some stations tape delayed it (that was one of his gripes and reasons for ditching the show...I think CBS would have kept him on for at least a few more years) or got the feed west of the Mississippi.

There are plenty of national network morning shows now. Is there not room for someone who would skew a little older and capture the plus-40 group. Of course, I have to say that the over 40 crowd is more today like a late 20's deployment of the great unwashed. A 45 year old is less mature today than a 45 year old was 45 years ago.

Perhaps?

Joe