K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Yeah, that's it, all right.
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New Life for REELRADIO
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This was written more than a decade ago, and the author is British, but overall, it's an excellent breakdown of the types and formulations of cassettes available in the 1980s.
While the official Type ranges were I, II, III and IV, the author also mentions what he calls "Type Zero" cassettes---the bargain basement stuff that didn't even meet the standards of Type I. They were the cheapest and a lot of radio got recorded by listeners on those.
Recalling 1980s Audio Cassette Tapes
Another of the many fun memories I carry from my youth relates to the Saturday mornings I’d spend trawling round the city centre record sh...
planetbotch.blogspot.com
Eons ago I've seen the "Type 0" tapes sold in early dollar type stores for like 69¢ for 3 and had no cases. I mainly used for dictation stuff, got at least Type 1s for music and radio.This was written more than a decade ago, and the author is British, but overall, it's an excellent breakdown of the types and formulations of cassettes available in the 1980s.
While the official Type ranges were I, II, III and IV, the author also mentions what he calls "Type Zero" cassettes---the bargain basement stuff that didn't even meet the standards of Type I. They were the cheapest and a lot of radio got recorded by listeners on those.
Recalling 1980s Audio Cassette Tapes
Another of the many fun memories I carry from my youth relates to the Saturday mornings I’d spend trawling round the city centre record sh...
I used those Certrons during my brief sports writing career for postgame interviews and dictation of results or statistics. They were fine for that purpose.
Yeah, in fact I'm pretty sure that's the tape stock we used for our field recorders at KOLO in Reno when I made the move to news. Anything more than spoken word was way beyond the spec.
The field recorders (two of them) were actually really good---the Sony TC-D5M:
Mark, I would be very interested in a copy of that KCFM aircheck. Could you send me a Direct Message on this page?
Believe it or Not Department:
In the 1980-1989 period when I syndicated "Música en Flor", a Beautiful Music format, to Latin America a big consideration was shipping and customs charges.
So I used Tascam 122 cassette decks (12 of them) and BASF Ferro Super (the commercial name for metal type IV tape that was better than chrome) cassettes we wound ourselves. Recording was done with peaks kept well below -5.
I heard comparisons in markets like Lima and Bogotá and Santiago where there were local attempts at the format using discs as their source. For the average listener on most home and car devices, there was no perceptible difference.
There was a lot of care in the levels when making the masters, and we used an Aphex Aural Exciter to gently make sure levels were not saturating the cassettes... which started really getting dreadful as you approached anything above -5.
At one point, I had around 70 stations using the format. We'd send about 6 to 8 new tapes every two weeks, and stations were supposed to destroy the old ones. No cassette would be in use at a station for more than 12 months, which meant that, at most, they played about 50 times.
In the 1980-1989 period when I syndicated "Música en Flor", a Beautiful Music format, to Latin America a big consideration was shipping and customs charges.
So I used Tascam 122 cassette decks (12 of them) and BASF Ferro Super (the commercial name for metal type IV tape that was better than chrome) cassettes we wound ourselves. Recording was done with peaks kept well below -5.
I heard comparisons in markets like Lima and Bogotá and Santiago where there were local attempts at the format using discs as their source. For the average listener on most home and car devices, there was no perceptible difference.
There was a lot of care in the levels when making the masters, and we used an Aphex Aural Exciter to gently make sure levels were not saturating the cassettes... which started really getting dreadful as you approached anything above -5.
At one point, I had around 70 stations using the format. We'd send about 6 to 8 new tapes every two weeks, and stations were supposed to destroy the old ones. No cassette would be in use at a station for more than 12 months, which meant that, at most, they played about 50 times.
This was written more than a decade ago, and the author is British, but overall, it's an excellent breakdown of the types and formulations of cassettes available in the 1980s.
While the official Type ranges were I, II, III and IV, the author also mentions what he calls "Type Zero" cassettes---the bargain basement stuff that didn't even meet the standards of Type I. They were the cheapest and a lot of radio got recorded by listeners on those.
Recalling 1980s Audio Cassette Tapes
Another of the many fun memories I carry from my youth relates to the Saturday mornings I’d spend trawling round the city centre record sh...
Not only did you need good-quality tapes but you needed good-quality equipment on which to record them, especially equipment that accepted the type II and Type IV cassette types. While most large professional broadcasters had that type of equipment, there were many amateurs, including yours truly, who didn't. I remember trying to record music off of the radio onto a Type II cassette using an old monophonic GE recorder I had that did very well with the better-quality Type I tapes. Unfortunately, with the Type II tapes, you actually lost sound on either one or the other channels when you tried to play them on a stereo recorder, and the sound was somewhat lower in volume (though not bad) when playing these in other monaural recorders.
By the mid-1980s, I had a stereo recorder that could handle the Type II bias tapes. And then out came the Type IV tapes that most of the current home audio equipment could not record--you had to buy a whole new cassette deck for those. I therefore wound up, like the aarticle's author, utilizing mostly Type II cassettes for my radio (mostly music) recordings.
And, as I mentioned before, but it may have gotten lost, by the mid-70s or so, the number of unscoped airchecks that came from the source (talent/station) was dwindling. Talent critiques were done with skimmers, cassette decks triggered by the mic switch.
By the time we got to the 80s, reel-to-reel decks were becoming less common in homes. And so, really from about 1975 onward, the majority of unscoped airchecks had cassettes of varying quality, recorded on tape decks of varying quality, as the source material. There absolutely were good recordings, but the percentage of bad ones shot way up.
That reminds me of my technique for airchecking with my air talent. I'd review a shift about once a week and find one really good thing and something that could have been done better. I'd write down the counter location on the aircheck cassette tape. The jock would hear the good one first, as often I found that PDs failed to tell their people how good some of their stuff was... so it was not reinforced and not repeated. Then I'd play the weak segment, and ask, "how would you do that if you could do it again?". That let the talent analyze their own performance, and then, often, they would ask for suggestions and my opinion on what might have been done.
I reacted this way when I learned about the GM of the leading Top 40 station in DC in the late 60's who had a red bulb in each corner of the studio ceiling. If they flashed, you would get "Johnny, you just ****ed up. You know that, don't you? Or are you an idiot?" And so on. I resolved that any aircheck had to be presented constructively.
I thought I'd drop this in since many collectors don't realize why we did airchecks to begin with.
Thanks for the info. I had thought, from some of the comments I had read on the Reelradio site, that many of the airchecks recorded in studio by the deejays were used by those same deejays as part of their resumes to other radio stations.
That is another use of an aircheck, for sure!
But at most well programmed stations in the era of the cassette or reel tape, an aircheck was mandated by the Program Director with the objective of meeting with talent to review performance.
I wish I had a copy of the old Jacobs form he used at KHJ to critique jocks. It had a bunch of both positive and negative things that would be checked off and a space to recommend improvement. One of the negatives was "Bakersfield sound". In other words, small market, unpolished, not smooth, not right for LA.
Personally, I never did such meetings with written "evidence". That allowed a lot of free discussion without the jock thinking that what they said might go into their "personnel folder".
Having stated how the Intenet Archive is, in fact, in very great jeopardy and is not a "safe haven" for airchecks, let me add to yeoldeschool's list.
If you have any interest in radio drama, there is a page on the Internet Archive called "The Suspense Project". "Suspense" was, in many ways, the last survivor of the so-called "Golden Age" of radio.
There are, as of this morning, 913 episodes of "Suspense" in the collection. They are up to September 9, 1962, usually posting one or two episodes a day. The final episode aired on CBS on September 30, 1962. Assuming they have the remaining three episodes, 916 episodes of the 945 that aired in 20 years will be on that page.
Many of these episodes are fully intact airchecks from local CBS affiliates (there are at least three from KNX, Los Angeles and one from KCBS, San Francisco).
I was six years old when "Suspense" vanished. I doubt I ever heard it, even passively (we were watching the TV that killed the radio drama). But listening to a couple of the episodes, it is a remarkable look at just how the half-hour drama took advantage of the lack of pictures---the "theater of the mind" effect, creating stories that might actually have been weaker if they'd been adapted for television:
BTW one of the reasons why the networks themselves didn't archive this material is because they didn't own it. The radio dramas were owned by the advertisers. They got all the original transcriptions. A lot of them were sold to radio syndicators and other companies that own the rights to all these historic programs. They continue to make them available to radio stations for rebroadcast on Sunday nights or other times. They also sell CDs or other formats that you can buy at Amazon or other places. So this content falls into a similar category as recorded music. At one time there was a group known as Friends of Old Time Radio, and they had an annual national convention.
It sounds like you were a good and consciencious manager. As poster MediafrogPlus stated in another thread (and I can confirm from personal experience), not all managers had the necessary training or were even inclined to supervise in the way you did.
They were, Ted, but those were almost always scoped (music and commercials edited out). A PD looking for talent wanted to hear the jock, and because he or she were listening to a lot of tapes, quicker was better.
Most recommended an aircheck with a job application be no longer than 4 minutes. That was tough. Here's an hour of Rich Brother Robbin at KCBQ, scoped, that just squeaks in under seven minutes because of the amount of live copy Rich had to read and a couple of unscoped promos:
Because jocks scoped job application airchecks, they really aren't a source of unscoped material, unless the jock kept the original and edited down a copy. Most jocks didn't do that, and so those originals are lost.
While you are correct, the Internet Archive is not the only place on the Internet that has reams and reams of old-time radio shows available for download. Since all (or nearly all) of the people who created these shows are now deceased and because many (though not all) of the old advertisers are now out of business or can't advertise on radio anymore (think of the various cigarette and alcohol sellers that used to sponsor these shows), I suspect that, unlike recorded music, there are a lot fewer copyright actions being taken against the purveyors of these shows online.
None of that changes the copyright situation. Content doesn't become public domain because someone dies or the company goes out of business. The ownership of that content is transferred to new entities.
I remember an article in Monitoring Times magazine (now defunct) that described the frustration PDs felt when they received unscoped airchecks. As the PD in the story put it: "I know what the Beatles sound like! What I'm interested in is what YOU sound like!"