Historical broadcast audio equipment

This is rather a niche question for discussion, but thought I might ask it here given the huge amount of combined knowledge on TV Forum!

I think I'm right in saying that originally, TV control rooms used gramophones to play out theme music etc, hence the term "grams operator". At some point, 1/4 inch reel-to-reel tape became commonplace until the 1990s when CD, MD and HDD-based systems became available.

Does anyone know how long gramophones lasted for before being replaced by tape? For instance, how long did the BBC and ITN use them for in TV production? Had they been phased out by the 1970s or earlier?

I appreciate this sort of question might be too specialist, but thought it was worth a punt.

1/4 inch 'Carts' were also used for spot music playback - not just 1/4 inch reel-to-reel - in the days before CD/MD and HDD playback became commonplace.



They were gone by the early 90s - when 1/4" was commonplace, and MDs beginning to appear. (CDs were less widespread because of the lack of recording functionality)

When I started working in telly, MiniDisc was pretty commonplace for playing in short bits of music, announcements, jingles and effects, plus some longer form items like Ceefax Music. They were still commonly referred to as "carts" and were similar to 1/4" tape carts in that they are fairly hardy things that can be stacked up in order and slapped into machines as required.

The King of Minidisc players were made by Denon
http://www.minidisc.org/images/den990r.jpg

MInidisc carts were still in use until relatively recently (I remember cueing them in the mid 2000s in Southampton) and survive here and there. Lots of galleries still have decks fitted.

They've been largely replaced by HDD devices like Instant Replay and PC based software like SpotOn.

I do remember there being a 1/4" reel-to-reel tape deck in the Bristol gallery in the mid 2000s too. It was used occasionally to record across ISDN lines from football grounds, and the match report, whenever it came, was then played into RadioMan for tx during the Saturday tea time regional news bulletin.

To this day however, many directors still say "Go Grams" despite probably never having cued an actual record...

It still amazes some people, that radio programmes were literally cut together using razor blades and bits of sticky tape. When did that die out? And what replaced it? SADiE type systems?

QI still has a Grams Operator listed I think. Always makes me chuckle

It may be of interest to some that ITN still have one or two reel-to-reel tape recorders kicking about in their control rooms. I don't think they use them anymore, though. I also saw one hanging about at the BBC in TC7 just before TVC closed in 2013.

It's interesting that in the late 90s, the BBC chose to go down the MiniDisc route (I remember News 24 using them in the early 2000s) whereas ITN chose Instant Replay. In fact, for a few years they also used Discart with audio recorded onto floppy disks! I don't think ITN used MD at all.

I think that would have been way back, in the 1940s and 1950s. If my memory serves, cartridges started replacing grams in the early 60s, around the same time 8 track stereos became a home format.

Or Cool Edit Pro (whether or not it that stations copy was licensed to Peter Quisgard or not )

As far as I was concerned over at the main commercial radio station in Birmingham - from 1998 - 2003 we used to record all the football commentaries coming down the ISDN's on 1/4 tape (and some Saturday's that could be up to five games at once) and then 'cut' off the goals and put them onto Sonifex carts (until 2000) and then loaded and clipped into the bespoke Capital Radio Group editing/playout system after then.

But the last time I had to splice a sending off followed by a penalty incident using a blade and sticky tape to allow a 40" cut to be loaded onto cart for playout after the game was somewhere around 1999. Next time I had to do it was digitally via the computer audio editor and it took half as long, and twice as precise.

Still not sure what I prefered.
Yes 'old school' pressure to get it right, not to slice you finger tips off and in a fast turnaround, no luxury of making a back-up copy (unless it was the live game and you could get a copy off the live show 'snoop' afterwards) so you had to nail it first time, and suppose was part of the fun (once the show and adrenaline surge had ended) but digital sound editing allows you to be quicker, more creative, and find a better cut afterwards, and tidy the edit up.

The one thing that Sonifex cart machines and Minidisc machines for playout had in common though - when the little b*stards played up and went wrong - they really went wrong! I can remember the commercial break being aired at 3.49pm once, and two of the carts started chewing up the ads playing in them.

Given all the goal clips were on cart, I had pick up the cart box leg it down to the newsroom (on a different floor) and play them in from that cart player deck in the news booth, with the live show tech op giving me a burst of talkback white noise as a cue.

'would love to experience that again..."

When started doing radio at college in 2000 we were taught to do this, but at the community station I was volunteering at we all had portable Mini-Disc recorders and also used Cool Edit Pro, and thats what we used at the university I went to in 2002.

The community station used ENCO DAD for playout so I'd use that for all the station imaging but they didn't give people access to put things onto it so everything else was on my own personal MDs. I did work experience at a commercial station in 2003 that had a networked ENCO DAD setup and I was taught how to edit in that.

You can do rough editing on most portable MD player (pause and split) which for many things was satisfactory, so while many of my fellow students would record their raw audio into CEP, edit it and then record it back to MD for playout, for simple things I tended not to bother.

One of the frustrating things I found about MiniDIsc was that, despite being a digital format, you still had to record it onto a computer in real time - most likely after having gone via an analogue cable. Did anyone ever make a MD to PC interface?

It's not radio but if anyone wants to see what a music edit looked like in the early 80s:

https://youtu.be/iMm-08uZXfo?t=17m41s

I spoke to a former Radio 5 live producer recently, who told me that her 'specialist geeky skill' was being able to spot every 'er' in a Tim Henman sentence from the waveform on the computer screen, and clip them out precisely, all without having to listen to any audio of the interview whatsoever!

Now you mention it, I've a vague recollection of those Denon machines having a PC Interface. I certainly remember being able to title clips (FAR easier than using the spinny wheel thing) but whether you could split/edit I can't remember.