Question for those who were in radio during the vinyl days

Technics SP10s or EMT 948s for my vinyl radio career.
I remember Stanton 500s being used and I think we tracked around 3 grammes.

No noticeable pops or jumps, but if cue burn became a problem we just replaced the copy.

Those were the days!


If I want to play something not on the radio station system these days I upload it from my server to Dropbox and play it out with Adobe Audition.

 

I have 100s of LPs from a radio station in my area. Never noticed Cue burn either.

 

I did radio in the early 80s, and although you could hear surface noise on the studio monitors, it never made it out over the air. I have no idea what kind of pre-transmission processing was done at the station where I did my show, but it did the job.

 

For mine it was Gates CB 77 turntables, Rek-O-Kut Rondine II turntables, Micro-Trak tonearms, Stanton 500 AL cartridges, lots of maintenance, the DJ operators and Program Director making sure records got replaced when worn or damaged. And engineering keeping them in tip top condition. Being a combo man, I did both.

 

I was an engineer at an Armed Forces Radio & TV (AFRTS) station during the mid 80s. We did nothing about surface noise, but most of the regularly played stuff was transferred to carts.
Weekly shows such as Casey Kasem came in on lps which were only played during the allotted time slot and then destroyed. I hated watching the operators smash those lps.

 

It's all coming back to me now.

The styli in the turntables were changed every fortnight.

 

I had a friend that worked at a radio station in the late '70s/early '80s. I asked him specifically the OPs question because I thought it was weird that I never heard crackles or pops over the radio. He said when something was added to the playlist it was first transferred to a cart from a brand new record and then the cart was played over the air.

 

I was a music nut, I usually had a favorite AM or FM station on when I could. And yet all those hours and years, I scarcely ever heard a skip. As far as surface noise, I remember noting how wonderfully quiet FM stations were late at night as they'd play an album side of Yes or ELP or something similar with quiet passages. It was the quality of FM radio, my friends buying 'good' systems, and the plethora of great albums coming out in the early to mid 70's that sparked me into a fledgling audio nut.

 

Still miss my college days of no-budget AM radio.

This involved being in a small closet of a room where I would bring in all kinds of different sources and if I used vinyl it meant jumping up to the other side of the room to two old sl-1200 workhorses with a Stanton 500, manually cueing the exact position of my own vinyl and then flying back to the mic on the other side of the room on time. I did this for years and was the only one who used vinyl so it meant digging everything back out. Despite the fact that there was no budget and no one ever listened I never once missed a cue and never used any lossy sources.

Damn that was some of the most fun I've ever had. I would do a full album a week, and all kinds of other fun gimmicks.

As far as the process went, I bought my first replacement stylus to change out in the station. I'd bring the cleanest stuff I had unless it was rarer.

 

In 1977, I was working for the meat packer that makes Spam.

I was still an audiophile, though.



Oh, I almost worked in radio. There was a late night show on a local radio station (KQAQ) called "Pipeline" which was similar to "Beaker Street", out of Little Rock, and manned by some guys who were going to the U. of Minnesota the next spring and they asked my friends and I if we wanted to take it over. We said yes and were all ready but the station cancelled the show instead. Oh well.

Doug

 

That may have been 1977 but that fan is circa 1952, lol.

 

That's the way it was in my very brief time in radio in the 80s. By the time I dipped my toes back in in the early 00s, it was all computers.

 

In 1977, I was in Grade 4.

 

The whole set-up looks '50s-'60s!

 

KRML, Carmel, Play Misty For Me station, same old RCA board and tape deck (used to play Clint's show tape, giving him time to get to the house to save the day). Turntables are behind me...another shot where you can sort of see the turntables, they were of course broadcast tables with decent carts, but no idea what.

but we clearly seemed to have record cleaning fluid nearby.

 

Turntables are RCA Broadcast. Tonearms appear to be Micro-Trak 303. RCA Broadcast console.

 

Wow, great eye!

 

I think people might not know that silence is the enemy when you are trained to work on radio. Only amateurs would cue a record up and let it roll for 10 seconds of silence. You cue it up properly, or if you don't you talk over the silence until it starts. You would rarely start a set with a song that starts quietly, and if you did you would talk over it until it got going.

Pops and clicks in the quiet passages of songs were normal. Culturally, people in the old days just tuned that out. If you worked for a large commercial station, the record companies would send you a small box of each of their popular 45's, and you might only play them a few times or so. If you worked for a college radio station, people would mark the bad tracks on records on the back of the sleeves and you would avoid them - they would also get marked up so that you would know which were the GOOD or hit tracks. Helpful for newbs.

That world is long gone.

 

Cartridges on the Micro-Trak 303 (Began life branded as Gray Laboratories/Micro-Trak) are Stanton 500 AL heavy duty. Cart machine appears to be an early Moulic. Which later became Macarta.