I used to play a lot of vinyl on WMBR, and when I listen to tapes/discs of my old show nowadays I feel that the "Rice Krispies" sound behind so many of the records I played made the shows sound unprofessional. It's amazing that WMBR still has most of the albums (of any consequence at all) that the station acquired during it's forty-five year history, but many of them from the 60's and 70's have seen better days condition-wise. They usually get rid of any that they find have become totally trashed (or replace them with CD's if possible), but many of the old records are in marginal condition with low-level crackeley surface noise and enough groove wear to shear off the high end of the original frequency response so that the music sounds muddy on the air.
I've actually gone over some of the discs of shows I did at WMBR in the past and (using Pro-Tools on my computer at home) replaced some of the crackeley, muddy vinyl records I played with digital copies of the songs from CD's or downloads, just to make my archive of the show sound better.
I could never make it through a two-hour show at WMBR without at least a couple of live CD screwups, though. Mistracking, skipping, stopping dead in the middle of songs, losing the cue during mic breaks, not recognizing legitimate CD's... it's not that they don't try to maintain their players and replace them when necessary, they do, but they use Denon's, and for years I've been trying to suggest that they switch brands (but I'm not an MIT student, so what do I know about tech issues...)
Even when these things are new, they have a really annoying <blink>intermittent</blink> habit of recueing your CD to Track One on the disc after a certain amount of time regardless of what track you cued up. When it happens, it seems to give you about a minute before it loses whatever track you cued and reverts to Track One, which means that if you have a long mic break, you have to keep an eye on the player and become adept at recueing it while talking when/if it loses the track you had cued. This happened to me sometimes a few times per show. Also, the soft touch pushbutton for opening/closing the tray only seems to last a few months on these players before it quits working.
I know that WMBR is spending much more money frequently replacing these expensive Denon's than if they used a more modest but more robust brand. I remember that they cycled through trying a number of common brands in the 90's including Sony, JVC, Pioneer, Technics and others and none of them held up at all, but when I did a few fill-ins at WUMB last year I was impressed with the Marantz players they had. They weren't fancy and were at least a few years old, but they worked perfectly. They still play all their music live from CD's during their live daytime programming, and you don't hear any CD problems on air there.
WBUR also has Marantz players in their main air studio as well. Though it's a news station, the players are often in use running network programming backups (just in case the satellite or digital programming vault system goes down), and some certain network shows are aired directly from CD as well. The only CD problems I've seen with those was usually due to a show being burned on a defective blank.
Also, a thirty year old analog Marantz receiver is still the heart of my home stereo system. It seems like a relatively generally durable brand.
> > playing vinyl rules... I feel like a real DJ when I do... I
> > do about half vinyl, half CD's on my show
> >
> Vinyl can have good sound quality; I was going through my
> old cass. tapes of
> shows I had done back during the all-vinyl days and it still
> sounded good.
> But CDs easier to cue up and for those playing multiple cuts
> off a CD,
> programming can be handy. I play all CDs it seems, esp. with
> the turntables
> not having working styli, but I'll go back and play some old
> vinyl if
> there's something that we have only on vinyl, etc.
>
> CDs and vinyl can last for a long time when well taken care
> of, of course!
>