Any Radio vets remember these Shaffer machines?

Friend, Most voice track talents I know really aren't making that much money and don't have benefits.

 

Oh I know, I didnt say the loads of money goes to the talent, they just have loads of money leftover from not having to have to maintain the automation machines.

 

Dan, my first job was at KTSM. The AM was playing MOR when I was there (72) and the FM was doing what you've described. One late night, I recorded myself saying "It's 8:30" and spliced it in the "even time tape." I'm told it played for years, and I DON'T sound like the real guy at all.
It was always noisy on air and cumbersome to operate. I'm not surprised that it was still in use, when you saw it in 81. They took better care of that stuff, than they did the AM.

 

The first two radio stations that I worked at in the early '80's, on the AM dial, played vinyl for music and spots/jingles on carts, but by the time that I moved onto my first FM station job a few years later, we were doing everything by semi-automation, using Drake Chenault reel to reel tapes. I have a few of those old reels in storage, but I dug up this old Century 21 reel, similar to the Drake reels, from the Chris C radio box, that I thought that you guys might like to see?

 

I thought I knew music , and I dont know ANY of those songs on that reel.

BTW what did stations do with these reels when they came out of rotation? Had to be tons of them piling up.

 

At KDON-AM in Salinas, CA in 1987 I ran the station and the Schaefer automation: four reels, four cart carousels (which were always misfiring for one reason or another), Toby Arnold out of Texas MOR music. we also had two stacked cart machines (3 slots in each) at the board as well as turntables and two reel to reels not in the automation chain.

I would always go away for the holiday weekends, and would always come back to the log showing all the misfired events, dead air, spot logs totally out of sync let alone daypart...always a pleasure. I usually monitored it but also usually left town for that time period.

With 4 reels and the carousels and each reel holding about 25 songs once you get them all fully cued at the beginnng of each (while something played on the turntable or on another deck) and you could theorteically go away for about 100 songs (1/4 to a 1/2 a days worth) and then just have someone come back and change the tapes, take all of 30 minutes. Usually the four decks normally were reloaded at all differing times as they ran independently of each other.

Had circuit board cards in the back of the main control unit which was open for heat and access, had all sorts of problems with misfires at one point and the engineer had to keep pulling it out and replacing it or fixing it somehow. By then it was becoming old equipment.

 

Oh cool! You remember Karl O then? He was quite the big fish in the little pond. An era when a local kid could become a broadcast mogul in his hometown.
http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_21293816/trish-long-karl-o-wyler-nurtured-radios-growth

My parents would play the easy listening KTSM in the car quite often for whatever reason, even though they were so much younger than the intended demo. In fact, it was during the hourly news break on that easy listening station is how we all first heard that Elvis Presley had died.

I can't remember when they finally ditched the easy listening format, but I bet it couldn't have been more than a couple or few years after I saw the station in the early-80s. IIRC they went to a very soft rock format, with lots of Christopher Cross, CSN, light Chicago, etc. I'd also guess they would've ditched that automated system around then as well.

The radio side is of course now owned by ClearChannel, and the TV side by some other corporate broadcaster (who also owns the CBS affiliate KDBC, I think). Times have changed since Karl's day!

dan c

 

Yet another reason modern radio is un-listenable .

 

So true my friend. I really miss the days of local stations without canned drop ins and sweepers between 3 songs in a row. XM/Sirius are irritating too. You hear the same 300 songs on "Lithium" that you would hear on a bad "Progressive" station. Boring as hell. I have to give props to 103.1 WRNR out of Annapolis Maryland.

 

I do! I worked weekends there, so I didn't see him much. He was a VERY conservative man. The radio guys had to wear ties during the week; we weekend types didn't have to do that, but no jeans or t shirts. The AM PD gave me the rock records that came in because there was no rock n roll. KTSM didn't air the first season of The Monkees, because Mr. Wyler could not stand them. Either the ratings or NBC forced him into it later on. I wasn't living in El Paso when the FM changed formats, but I can't remember if they waited until Karl Wyler passed away or not.

 

This fascinating discussion brings back memories from the '70s of the awful (yet wonderfully tacky) FM station that my dad used to sing along with (off-key, of course) in the car.

 

Just recently Im driving my parents to Virginia, had sirius on the 60s channel, my parents are both singing and harmonizing with each other, they never miss a note. Im lucky to have my parents.

Back on topic, no personality on the 60s station.

 

I have a picture of me babysitting one of those carousels on 1390 WEOK in early 1987. Thankfully I graduated to the FM side that June!

 

Moving to the FM side was a graduation? Did FM not have the automated reels?

 

Doh! I was on the FM side when I was using these machines. I think the carousel was broken more than it ever worked, so we wound up using a bank of about six ITC cart machines, for which we had to constantly replace the tapes during each break. The Schaefer automation system was fairly primitive, and basically hit machine A, machine B, machine C, machine D, machine E, and then back to an open reel deck for the music. God help you if one of the machines was empty or had the wrong spot in it.

 

I was drafted at age 16 onto a Hot AC in '86 that flipped to an automated 'Great Entertainer' in Feb '87, so I spent the next 4 months putting out every trick in the book to get a slot on 101.5 WPDH, the heritage AOR I grew up with and hosted my first show literally 3 hours after I graduated High School in June 1987. I worked my way up to Morning Drive in '92 where I stayed though multiple lineup changes through 2003. Fun times!

 

Dead air until you shoved a cart in the empty slot? Especially when you were on the throne listening to the feed.....dammit this is the forum where my gallows humor might be perceived as going too far.

 

Oh, I did my share of yelling and running down the hall when the silence-sensor didn't kick in. Awful memories of those panicky situation.

My greatest memory was the station being knocked off the air by lightning. I had just taken a transmitter reading -- the xmitter room was about 15 feet away from the control room -- and I had used a chair to stand on to see one of the top meters. BOOM, the station got hit, all the lights went off, then the emergency lights went on. I walked into the transmitter room... and the chair I had been standing on :30 seconds earlier was knocked over and smoldering on the floor. The electricity had arced out of the metal wall and hit the chair, swear to god. :30 more seconds, and I would've been 'lectrified.

 

That would've spooked me for at least a week!

 

Lucky indeed! I was stuck in the car with muzak-y instrumental music by the likes of Hugo Winterwanker.

 

Let's not talk about being electrocuted when I'm changing out an old ceiling fan for a nice overhead fixture.

 

Anybody here work with "MacKenzie" tape players? They were handy for things like station jingles, jock IDs, etc.

http://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardware/carts.htm

Louis G. MacKenzie developed his "repeater" in 1955. Using a silver coated tag applied to an endless tape loop (to provide a "cueing" function, the single and "five pack" machines could provide instant starting of desired spots. The tape cartridges were square metal boxes, with the tape loop hanging out.

The MacKenzie repeater was used extensively in places as diverse as radio stations, television and movie studios, and Disneyland. The multi-deck units were very popular for use to insert "sweeteners" in television and movie productions - added laugh tracks, for example, or audience applause, etc. Perhaps the biggest drawback for broadcast was that the tape loop was exposed outside the cartridge, making it easy to damage.

 

It was a creepy old place to work, too. We were in an abandoned, condemned 1920s hotel on Bayshore Blvd. in Tampa, and the radio station had been at the back of the hotel for a long time. I was convinced serial killers were waiting for me in the hallways. A couple of years later, the station changed formats from beautiful music to Top 40 and became the #1 station in town: Q105. Literally, from worst to first in about six months.

 

I read about that unit, the pre-cart machine cart machine. Theres only a few pictures of it, and I still couldnt figure out how you put tape in that thing.

 

The biggest failure I ever had to work with was a complete tone system with integrated vertical lp players, a total of 4, that were used on the FM side that quickly sensed the dead space between the lp bands and were programmed to play 2 tracks and then a commercial. At 30 minutes and on the hour a ducking compressor would allow a recorded talk over announcement of the station call letters and freq as required by the FCC. What an awful excuse for not hiring some one for $5 an hour in the early 70's to just play some records. Took me a year to convince our station manager to ditch that system. Awful.