Any Radio vets remember these Shaffer machines?

Would you happen to rermember the brand name of those vertical players? So you had to load those up with a new record everytime it played a song? Did it cue itself?

 

Only vertical player I am aware of would have been sourced from Seeburg. Their Select-O-Matic 45 mechanism in a similar cabinet to the Library Unit was used in Gates first automation system. Seeburg released a home console using a LP version of the jukebox mechanism in the 1960's, maybe some automation vendor bought that mechanism and modified it.

 

--------------------------------
From McLover's post below, I think they were Seeburg units, but it played LPs and I hated it. I also know that system was not cheap to install. The tables were fully auto and each one had maybe 6-10 lps that were automatically changed out, I think ( it was nearly 40 years ago) . We changed the lps in those players about once a week and when we went back to playing lps on regular turntables we kept using it for our subcarrier Muzak system we sold to restaurants, stores, and your local elevator.

I was the only engineer on staff and would come in at 5:45am and do my on-air shift from 6am to 10am on both AM and FM. Another on-air person from 10am to 3pm. Another people, college students I hired, worked 3 to 6pm (except Friday) and 6 to midnight, it was muzak after that until Midnight. Friday nights were different as we did High School football games over the tele lines, live until about 9pm or when the games were over.

We would do the occasional remote broadcast from restaurants and stores looking to increase traffic. Those were generally fun.

Small stations do not have engineers behind the glass handling the music, commercials, and reading the news....it was all on us. Sundays were usually R2R tapes of various church programs. We also did feeds of Nascar on Sundays. Once you are in it at this level, the glamour is gone from "The Biz".

I believe now you don't even need to have a full time engineer on staff, just one on call and some "meter-readers" to fill out the station logs. Probably makes more sense. The equipment was generally pretty reliable.

 

Where I worked the engineers put the tape in the mechanism. As I recall, there was a special tape formulation required. The tape was recorded on a standard open reel machine then cut and spooled into the mechanism. It was more of a permanent installation sort of thing as opposed to the carts that were standard for decades. My experience with it was in the mid 70s, I never saw another MacKenzie and few folks I worked with had even heard of it.

 

Oh it was definitely a graduation. The FM was a 50,000 classic rock station and I literally graduated High School that nite haha