Did ABC-TV sound different that the other networks in the 1960s?

Back in the 60s I could usually tell an ABC show by listening, and this was through average TV speakers. I'm not sure exactly what it was about the sound that was different. Perhaps they used a unique eq curve or compression?

 

With the little bitty 14" B&W televisions we had in the 1960s, none of the networks sounded particularly distinguished.

 

It also depended on where your market was in the phone-line chain that carried the audio. Back in the early 70s, our Philly radio station signed on to carry an ABC FM Network feed. The same line carried all of the ABC networks and ours was just one of the many.

The network feed sounded like crap - it sounded like a telephone conversation. Our engineer complained and was told that it sounded that wasy because we were at the end of the "New York South Loop". Basically this was a line that went from New York straight to somewhere in the southern US, and then looped back from there, city to city, finally getting to Philadelphia before heading back to New York.

As an experiment, the network guys set up a special feed just to us in Philly to see if it improved things, and it did. It sounded like the network guys were local. But they were not allowed to keep this feed to us, so we were reverted back to the NY South Loop.

I've never worked in TV, but am pretty sure it might have worked the same way. As a Philly resident, I could tune into WABC-TV New York, and their network sound sounded incredibly good, while our ABC affiliate's sound suffered from the telephone-type line that the audio feed arrived on.

That said, we also had an alternate way of getting ABC's sound, since our affiliate was on Channel 6. We could tune in to 87.7 FM and get channel 6's sound, which improved it somewhat, mostly because of better speakers attached to the FM tuners.

Through it all ABC-TV's sound in the sixties was just a notch above the other two networks, at least from my perspective. NBC was the muddiest, with CBS falling in the middle. ABC had just a bit more in the highs. All of this coming from my perspective in Philly.

 

I could always tell by the sound which network was on TV.
I could also tell by the video.
NBC seemed to have a high pitched artifact somewhere in the transmission that was instantly recognizable.

 

All network stations theoretically were using AAA AT&T phone lines for sending audio to their affiliates all the way through about 1980/1981 or so. Somewhere around then, AT&T switched to digital lines and the response shot up from like 8kHz to 15kHz overnight.

I agree that some network sources had high-pitched 15.75kHz carrier noises (maybe from a bad horizontal flyback circuit) from time to time, as well as cue track noise getting into the audio track head on misaligned VTRs. Even in the bad old 1960s and 1970s, you could hear the harmonics marring regular network audio. I noticed when I first visited LA in 1975 that I was taken aback to watch network shows and hear perfectly clear audio, equal to or better than FM radio. I realized that sometimes they were playing back the videotapes locally, actually bypassing the NY feeds in some cases.

A lot of stations used pretty heavy-handed audio processing, like CBS Labs Volumax and stuff like that, which would slowly r-a-i-s-e the level if the signal got too low. This is why in quiet moments, sometimes the hiss and noise would start going up and up and up and then suddenly duck down when one of the characters in the show finally spoke. I can recall many 1970s TV shows doing that due to overcompression.

 

Right!
CBS seemed the most obvious as far as over compression went.

It's nice to know that these then-weird acknowledgements of my TV watching were real technological aspects!

 

As a Philadelphia area child in the 70s watching OTA on a 25" RCA console I couldn't hear the difference between the networks I swear I could see the difference between them. Just something about the picture.

Cheers, Michael

 

Never noticed any difference in NYC

 

No, you wouldn't since NY originated the network sound and the stations weren't relegated to phone lines for their sound.

Whenever I could tune into a New York TV station, I'd marvel at how clear it sounded.

 

I just had a friend of mine correct me: apparently it was early 1978 when the networks started using a 5.8MHz subcarrier (non-digital!) multiplexed with the video signal, and this immediately extended the frequency response out to 15kHz or so. He says the sound quality prior to 1978 was more like 7kHz at best (!!!), which explained why music concerts and stuff like that sounded so dull and muddy. A $79 cassette deck had better response than that.

Note that Beta Hi-Fi and VHS Hi-Fi VCRs later did a similar trick around 1983, providing better-quality stereo sound with a subcarrier on the video track.

 

And that DuMont really did the trick

 

I've said it before in previous threads regarding audio for television, I wish CBS would come out with a 5.1 version of the Volumax and solve their horrible audio they send out these days...

 

Won't happen. No CBS Laboratories left to do so.

 

The Volumax is a very severe, unsubtle, crazy compressor that really wreaked havoc on signals. They have much more sophisticated ways of dealing with audio now, particularly if the mixers follow standard ITU Loudness guidelines. "In theory," if the show is mixed correctly, the processing hardly does anything.

 

You know, I would bet if somebody really wanted to, they could take a hardware Volumax, run test signals through it, analyze it, then recreate it as a digital plug-in. But I'm telling you, to me they sounded really bad. This was sledgehammer processing.

 

I remember that! I learned to associate hiss to serious and pensive moments.

 

I seem to recall it had a crisper sound quality