Posts by WowandFlutter 12 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2020
I remember the big selling point of the Neve/AMS Audiofile editing system in the mid 1980s was the fact it was powered by an Inmos Transputer. I went from 78 or 33 rpm gram decks, sticky splicing tape, ¼" magnetic recording and optical film tracks to 8 tracks of PCM audio at 48kHz in a few weeks. Transformed to world of TV and audio post production.
In the 1980s, the main radio studios in the BBC had a lot of gram decks made by a company called EMT. Wonderful machines, incredible quick start, push button reverse cue for setting the start point, time to run counter in mins & secs etc. all you could ever want in a deck designed for a major broadcaster.
However, all the transport controls were back lit tactile buttons which had a tendency to trigger erroneously when you carried any static. You only had to get within a cm or so for the switch to trigger the CMOS circuitry and all hell would break loose. Not just limiting the playback to normal 33 or 45 rpm you now had an infinite variation including reverse at top speed. So fast in fact that the cartridge and tonearm would be ejected off the disc with a loud splat to accompany the catastrophe.
To add to the fun, most of the carpets were hard wearing nylon. If you were working with a 'personality' that was unpopular (some were!) a surprising number of production staff would be seen rubbing their feet vigorously on the floor on their walk into the studio - I wonder why?
MIDI found its way into broadcasting too as a useful extra tool.
In the late 1980s when the Yamaha DMP7 MIDI mixer was first released, MIDI was used as a way of getting around the security restrictions at major sporting events like the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. One DMP7 was placed in the 'secure' athletes area with the mic and audio connected to the broadcast comms. A second DMP7 was placed in the 'tech' area connected with just the appropriate pair of MIDI in<>out cables running down the corridor. The athlete's mic fader was then remotely operated from the tech area 'by magic' with out the need for the sound operator to have physical access to the tightly controlled secure area.
Still have 2 working Atari ST1040e systems with the SM124 mono monitor, Steinberg Pro 24 (with blue dongle) and a Cubase Notator/Unitor Timecode interface. Automated mixdown on the cheap with 8 track audio and film or U-Matic video. Still waiting for that 'emergency' job.
The current fad for excessive whitespace around icons and gui elements is a total nightmare - it's not just Gnome and Linux but MacOS and Windows are guilty too.
I seem to have less screen real-estate now on a 5K screen than I did 15 years ago on a 1080x768. All because of some perceived need to make desktop and tablet interfaces the same.
A few years ago I spent sometime teaching visually impaired computer users to edit audio using various Windows and Mac DAWs. The change from bordered icons to a new style of borderless or focus on hover icons made the packages unusable overnight. The so called 'Accessibilty' options don't help either - it's very difficult for the gui to highlight a non-existant border.
FM gave us the fidelity, and you could always drop one channel if there was an azimuth problem; often caused by a cassette duplication problems at source from the game companies.
The AM gave us the range as long as the upper frequency in the FSK (frequency shift keying) pair was clean (about 2kHz or so), which was OK for the 4.5kHz bandwidth of a AM Medium Wave transmission if slightly under-modulated. Also, we did have at least 100kW to play with.
As for the mystery format, could be anything we had in the cupboard at the time. As well as the usual Commodore and Tandy suspects there was an Oric 1, Oric Atmos and Jupiter Ace as mentioned, but also my favourite, a Memotech MTX512. The programme presenter was a guy by the name of Chris Jones.
Radio reception in Caerphilly was always bad due to the 'mountain', I used to live north of Ystrad Mynach in Penpedairheol.
I used to work on the BBC Wales off-shoot of the Micro Show in the early 80s. (I still have a Jupiter Ace and Oric Atmos that was sent into the show for review all those years ago).
One of the tasks at the end of the show was to hang around in the transmission continuity for Radio Wales and Radio Cymru and wait until the end of the normal schedule of programmes, which was normally around midnight. I would then load up a ¼ inch tape machine with the tape containing a BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum listing (being the BBC we had to be fair to both sets of enthusiasts and alternate every week). Then turn off the normal transmitter signal processing (an early form of Optimod) and press the play button.
Hopefully, someone was at home listening and loading the game off-air. The only problems we faced was that the system was very fussy about the tape head azimuth and quite often some pass band filtering improved the chances of success. However, we did get quite a few letters from Norway claiming it got that far.
In 1983, I worked as an Audio Supervisor and occasional reviewer for various off-shoots of the BBC Micro Show with a presenter called Chris Jones.
At the end of the broadcast we would transmit a file listing in the usual warble and screech (bi-phase) audio format. Seem to remember we tried to keep it fair by alternating BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum files and recommended that the listeners recorded the transmission onto cassette. We would also repeat the broadcast at the end of the day before closedown (in the days before 24 hour broadcasting).
Although it was hit and miss at times, it did work with a bit of equalisation on the AM band (4.5kHz bandwidth) but we had to remember to turn off the the in-line audio processor. Much easier to get working on FM (15kHz bandwidth). The files were played off a ¼" tape (Studer A80, £15,000 a piece in 1983) through a BBC designed sound desk (about £250,000). Photos of the desk at can be found at http://www.orbem.co.uk/cons/conscf.htm (Cardiff MaxiCon).
Incidentally, I still have a working Jupiter Ace with a 16k memory pack that was sent for review by Jupiter Cantab - unfortunately the company went bust just after the review. Shame, as I found Forth quite fun to programme in.
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