Because I don't want to get sued. It's that simple.
The RIAA couldn't care less about history. They're just trying to squeeze income from a dying business model. If you have a Kindle, imagine if Amazon charged you every time you read a book (or, technically, the license to access the DRM-controlled file) that you already bought. With the exception that, in the case of an aircheck, someone else has already paid the license, it's a similar situation with airchecks.
It's vandalism, in the most literal sense.
For reporting purposes, I bought TDK ADs in bulk from Burstein-Applebee in Kansas City, an electronics distributor that no longer exists. (B-A also had retail stores in the Kansas City area, but I was just a bit too far away.) The Superscope that I mentioned earlier could only really accept normal-bias (Type I) tapes. When I finally got decent stereo equipment in 1980, I started buying Type II tapes from TDK and Maxell for personal purposes. All have survived well to this day. Occasionally, other brands would enter the picture if I saw a good deal.
By the way, in journalism school, we were expected to supply our own cassette tapes for field reporting anyway.
Even though I worked mostly for AM stations, I still cared about audio quality. I tried to avoid the white-label junk that often floated around radio stations. The Superscope provided good quality, though it was a compact tank. Later there were similar recorders from Marantz, as there was some kind of merger or connection with Superscope, that also provided good results, and were lighter, but also just didn't last as long.
I had not heard the "Type Zero" moniker before, but it's definitely true!
I'm jealous! No station I ever worked for, not even KTRH, was willing to spring for something of that quality for field use. KTRH did have great reel-to-reel equipment for in-house use. The last news director I worked for at KTRH actually wanted field recordings to sound bad because he thought that was more "authentic". This, even though the station was processing audio through a nice Dorrough processor. The care that I took with recording, and the fact that I was on good terms with the engineering staff, actually counted against me in that regime.
This is an important point that often was lost on people. Saturation could happen at relatively low peak levels. So you had to keep your levels lower than you might have wanted, at the cost of having a noise floor that seemed higher, even with Dolby noise reduction. Dolby noise reduction, especially Dolby C, helped, but saturation would also reduce your frequency response. Dolby HX was supposed to provide more headroom. Did you use anything like that toward the end of that 1980-1989 period?
Tascam still makes wonderful stuff, by the way.
I was starved for feedback in my radio career after I graduated from the university. The best feedback was from my first news director at KTRH, who took an approach similar to yours, combined with well-timed phone calls that always started out on a positive note. Any time it looks like you're writing something down, it really gets in the way of the conversation that you want to have happen. When the final news director started writing stuff down, writing detailed memos, getting angry when I asked questions, etc., I knew things were not going well. But enough of that. Jacobs' form, to my way of thinking, would be likely to turn what should be a mentoring conversation into a checklist activity with a resulting discussion that could become adversarial. Checklists have their uses but only in the right circumstances.
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