The Broadcast Cart Machine
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- Опубликовано: 17 июл 2017
- From the 1960s through to the 90s radio DJs used Cart machines to play jingles and now I've managed to get hold of one. In this video I get to try out the tech by playing some interesting old recordings.
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Jerobeam Fenderson for the intro animation: oscilloscopemusic.com/
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Over Time - Vibe Tracks • Over Time - Vibe Track...
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ThatSFXGuy - • Six Million Dollar man...
Additional Information:
Here are a few things that have already been discussed about the video on Patreon that might help answer a few potential questions.
1) Cue Tones - and the lack of recognition on my machine
The stereo Dr Dre cart would most likely have its cue track in a configuration that my mono machine can't read…however none of the cue tones on my mono carts were triggering anything with my machine..including the one I recorded on it.
2) Scarcity - It may seem surprising that working cart machines aren't easy to find on the second hand market in the UK but I suspect that any working models are still in demand in the radio industry so there's no need to sell them off on ebay. It’s just the old broken models that end up there.
3) Blanked Carts - The jingles "Fastest Thing in the Air" and "TGIF (which turns out to be Thank Goodness It's Fun) are jingles created by the Jingle company “Pams” in 1964 that were used by a number of radio stations www.pams.com/cuts-27.html
4) Who is Kenny Lynn? - I found details of some club DJs in the UK with a similar name however jingles on carts are something a radio DJ would use…so I’m not sure what station they were from. However just for the record...I'm really not looking to find anything out about this chap...I was just mentioning that I couldn't tell you much about him. But for those people who are (bizarrely) suggesting it's `Kenny Lynch" - that's a different name with a shhh sound at the end. Listen to the jingles again and you'll hear it's "Here's Kenny Lynn" with no shhh sound at the end. Also to anyone suggesting it's the famous UK DJ and TV personality 'Kenny Everett'...I really can't account for what's happening in your head.
5) A few people wanted to 'correct me' to say that carts didn't use mobius loops and the reverse isn't recorded on. This 'correction' is wrong - they did and they do and mine is and here's an article from 1959 explaining the process books.google.co.uk/books?id=S... and here's a video where I PLAY BOTH SIDES OF THE TAPE - • It really was a double...
6) Anyone interested in hearing the backing music for the Kenny Lyn spots - here it is in full: • Franck Pourcel - Days ...
Q) What type of self adhesive sponge did I use to repair the Cartridge?
A) Stokvis TLD9624
I bought it at Clas Ohlson - it might be this one (but I'm not 100%).
www.clasohlson.com/uk/Dust-Sea... 
Наука
Anyone interested in hearing the backing music for the Kenny Lyn spots - here it is in full: ruclips.net/video/4E5AXF0R2tE/видео.html
Yeah. I would like a copy of the adverts and the big recording too. Little bits of period specific work like that are very interesting.
Thanks. This would probably have been stuck in my mind for the better part of my life. :D
gsedinburgh The Wednesday, Thursday and Friday jingles were originally came from WCBS-FM during its progressive rock days in 1969 through 1970 when it was called pre-oldies until it became an oldies station a few years later in 1972. The jingles from its pre-oldies years at WCBS-FM is posted on Don Swaim's website. The last several jingles were from the pre-oldies years while the rest were from the mid to late 1970's when WCBS-FM was in its first several years as an oldies station. You can hear the "Wednesday" jingle played while the singers were saying "WCBS-FM" and the other jingle missing is the jingle singers sang "There's a whole lot of Wednesday going on, WCBS-FM!!!" That is not part of the package, it needs more jingles like "Monday" through "Friday" from WCBS-FM from the pre-oldies years. If you have not heard it. Take a listen. There's also the last batch of jingles from its progressive rock years are on there if you are interested.
donswaim.com/wcbs-fm-Jingle-package.mp3
Thanks for the link MTN. That was pretty damn neato.
spiff2268 You're absolutely welcome. I've hear the "Tuesday" jingle during the package which was the last batch of jingles during its progressive rock years where the singers went like this "WCBS-FM, what a nice thing to do, on a Tuesday." They did the same for the Wednesday jingle as heard in this cart minus the words "WCBS-FM". That's kinda interesting to hear if you are a New York Radio nut who are fans of WCBS-FM during the pre-oldies period. Remember Bill Brown? He was the first PD of the station in 1969 until it went oldies in 1972 until he ended in 2005 when the station flipped to "Jack". During its pre-oldies years are Bob Lewis (aka Bob-a-Loo), Steve Clark, Bobby Wayne (aka "The Wizard") and many other jocks? You know what I mean.
Kennylynn - one word.
He lived in Tunbridge Wells back in the 70s and did a little with the hospital radio there. He also run one of the most successful mobile discos in the south east at the time.
Finally he ran the short lived Kennylynn School of Broadcasting, which advertised in the early Capital Radio in London.
That name is a blast from the past !
Are there any recordings of this 'Kennylynn' show?
Nice copy paste from the digitalspy website
@@dan3a Well at least he informed us, unlike you.
@@BlitzHopB he could have at least put credit.
Dan3a Oh like anyone does that, please leave us alone with your nonsense
Getting hold of a Radio 1 cartridge which you likely heard in the 70s. How cool is that?
More like scary. I would be minus 20years old at that time. If I heard that and remember the 70s I'd be possessed or something 😝
Well he paid for it in licensing fees lol
"Wednesday is all over everything"
FLIPPIN 'ECK MARTIN! YOU SPILLED THE WEDNESDAY AGAIN?!?
Don't worry, there's a whole lot of Wednesday going on.
Sounds like a strange euphemism
@@Milamberinx WCBS-FM
A machine from the 1950's that can play a cartridge from 1996. Amazing. Someone finally did something right with tech!
I like the old warm grain/haze these give to sounds/music. I would love to use these for modern music making
That's only due to exponential technology advances.
And example of that, is compact cassette tapes. They were released in 1963 and were commonly used up until the late 90's. That's about 40 years. Compact discs, aka CD's were released in Japan in 1982, and were used up until 2010's. That's about 30 years.
MP3 players were released around 2000, and would have been lucky to have been used for 10 years.
The exponential advancement of technology means technology is obsolete faster with each passing year.
You could make a 30 minute video about an electric tin opener and I'd watch it. Keep up the good work.
UXXV don't give him ideas
spot on! never thought I'd be interested in more than a few of these videos, because of some personal nostalgia etc. Well now I'll dream about that mesmerising Kenny Lynn jingle with a Gakken WorldEye playing somewhere in the background. And I almost bought a Sony field recorder.
I’m sure he’d find some suitably interesting vintage tin opener, operated by steam-driven solenoids or something ... ;)
I could watch him make a 30 minute advert for squarespace :p No hate, he deserves the support from ad companies.
UXXV hah me too. Love this guy.
Bit of trivia, when we were recording on them we'd put them in a splice finder first, then play a few seconds past the splice. This meant if the splice was going to break, it would do it after the cut played, and also you wouldn't hear the dropout as the tape ran over it. There were 3 tones. When you pressed record that basically was your 'stop' tone, so the deck knew when to start. There was then 2 other tones, one was generally used to mark the end of the track, which would disconnect the play head and if equipped fast forward to the start mark. Disconnecting the play head meant you didn't hear the 'blip' of the start of the track when it cued up. The second tone tended to be used to fire the next track, so it would be added at the fade mark or when you wanted to trigger the next cut for a smooth segue.
Stop on, multideck Sonifex units used the second trigger tone. I remember wiring up a triple that was used for adverts...
I worked on the air for 37 years. You warmed my heart.
>whole lot of friday going on
damn thats a good jingle
I'd say so!
It just says “Whole lot of Friday going on, WCBS-FM!” from 1970 during the pre-oldies format when it was progressive rock.
I worked at a station where we had 4 of these in the main studio (one old Spotmaster and three newer Broadcast Electronics) several others were floating around in production rooms. I would put a commercial cart in each one, and punch the start button on the first and they would play in turn. There was a bump tone encoded at the end of each spot, that with proper wiring would signal the next machine to start. We cut and wound the tape by hand so that there was only enough for the recording that was on it at the time. Now it's all on a computer hard disk. Oh for the day when you had to actually work!
Does that mean hooking up to the "remote" port at the back? It seems a rather impressive connector with about 9 pins or so! Any idea which signals were sent over that port?
The remote port will simply be to facilitate wiring up remote start, stop and record buttons so that the operator doesn't have to press the buttons on the machine itself. The signalling used would be simple voltage triggers.
Fast recue, plus the automatic triggering of another player, are not supported by Techmoan's deck - it's too old and basic. To do those required the ability to record secondary and tertiary cue tones, which were at different frequencies to the primary cue tone, with the deck being configurable to do different things when it detected them.
Typically, detecting a secondary cue tone would drop the player into fast recue, while detecting a tertiary cue would fire the next player in the sequence. However, at one radio station I worked at, the Chief Engineer developed a clever system whereby the leading edge of the secondary tone fired the next player, and then the deck jumped into fast recue when the secondary tone stopped - so one tone was doing two things.
Neil Forbes or tune out because they don't care to hear automation lol
Dylfun Many, many stations go through the automated period in larger markets even. Computerized made it even more common. Up until recently, you'd STILL hear stuff-ups during the day on flagship AM news stations, with two spots playing at once or a spot and a liner both playing at once. But for music stations anyway, it always lowered ratings.
Most stations are at least partially automated now, even with live announcers.
Neil Forbes Failure of automation never caused them to stop using it, here!
Radio one is 50 years old this year, you may want to send them a copy of those jingles, in typical BBC fashion they probably don't have a copy anymore !
Do you mean with that, that the BBC throws away their own old jingles?
Simufreund309 i can't tell if your being sarcastic, but if not, yes,the BBC likely find not retain jingles.
No, I wasn't sarcastic.
They throw everything out apart from the old diddlers.
and we know who's responsible. ruclips.net/video/a3muVQQMqR4/видео.html
I grew up with these machines! My Dad was a Radio DJ and Program Director, and as a kid during the summers of the early to mid 1970s, I would go to work with him; with my "job" being to erase the old Jingle carts with the demagnetizer.
We had a 3-cart deck in the college radio station where I DJ'ed. The carts have TWO cue tones: One cues it to the beginning of the jingle and a second one triggers the next cart player.
Really? What happened with them then, were entirely new jingles put on them or something?
@@TracksWithDax Exactly. Jingles, ads, promos, public service announcements, station ID, any short bit that needed to be aired that lasted between a few seconds to a few minutes. Yes, some stations even put songs on there as a early move toward station automation.
Your Radio One jingles were from around 1969. I recognize the jingle package. It's from a company called PAMS. )
From Dallas, TX. (PAMS)
Indeed. Radio 1 was a copy of Wonderful Radio London, which introduced the swinging PAMS jingles to the UK. Now they're called JAM Productions. Not the robotic voice was done with a device called a Sonovox. @techmoan you should do a video on one!
ruclips.net/video/06aUr8v3VMg/видео.html
You are the only other guy in 30 years to remember PAMS... when I had a radio show we had a PAMS package... that was in about 1975...
I purchased their "converted" 8 track 1 inch Ampex recorder system in 1987-8. In Mesquite, TX.
@Superb Media Content Creator. You had a show? Do you have any airchecks from that show?
I discovered your channel about a month ago. I really enjoy the older tech you review. Many years ago (1988-1998) I worked in small-town radio here in the US. All of the material we broadcast came from a microphone, telephone, turntable, reel-to-reel or cart deck. We used carts for ads and jingles/liners. We had a small electromagnet that was used to blank out a cart so it could be re-recorded. One of the local car dealerships would call in and record a series of ads for different cars he had on the lot. Sometimes a spot would run 25 seconds, sometimes 45 seconds. Sometimes he had 3 cars to talk about, sometimes seven. And he often had re-takes. We recorded them onto reel, made notes to know which ones had re-takes and how long they were. They were then all recorded onto the same cart...so they would rotate evenly each time his scheduled ad aired. The WORST thing in the world was to miscalculate the length and have the cart run out 5 seconds before the last ad was done being recorded. Or to miss a re-take. You had to blank the entire cart and start over from scratch.
I should add that we had a triple-decker in the broadcast studio and two single cart models very similar to yours in the production studio. Every now and then the triple-decker would go on the fritz. We would have to move the two single decks into the main studio and if you had several 30 second spots that were recorded onto 70 or 90 second carts, you would have to manually stop them and put them into a "cue up" stack. When the ad break was over, you spent the next several minutes getting your carts cued up to be played again.
Alan Armstrong well if you ran out five seconds early, you could just re-record the cart, no? Waste all of a few minutes, or am I missing something?
I always LOVED radio, especially small town radio. What part of the country? We had lots of small stations I liked here in Oregon and Washington.
anyone think of bigclive when you saw the tester?
Senor Bob I did as soon as I saw that Red Quick Test!
yes sir. bigclive is the master of the tester ;)
I did!
I did, yes.
I did :)
lol, I remember those so clearly. I worked in radio for about 8 years. One of my jobs included working at a "semi-automated" radio station. I was live from 6 am until 10 am, then "pre-recorded" on two additional stations until 3 pm. Out station was semi-automated, which meant we had real-to-real machines for most of our music. They (6 different machines) were engaged via a specific program that started each machine in a specific predetermined order. Each machine was started using an "AUX" tone on the tapes...an inaudible tone the computer recognized as a signal to begin the next item on the list. I would record my voice-over or out-tro to each segment on a cart, knowing which song was listed next on the predetermined playlist. I literally would sit by my pool, listening to myself on the radio throughout the afternoon. (being rebroadcast on the other two stations, their machines could interpret the AUX tone as well.) I'd have to call in if I heard that my tape miss-queue to the wrong song and ask them to "playthrough" whatever was missing to catch up to my voice-cart or the music. (we even had live time-checks via prerecorded time carts that would automatically advance one cut every minute and randomly play between songs or even my voice clips to update the listener.)
They were a common way to play commercials, of course. Each tape would stop at the beginning of the commercial after it was played. The AUX tone was what stopped the playback. When I recorded commercials, the first thing the recorder would record was that tone, so it know when to stop after playing. The same thing was used in my pre-recorded shows. I would press the button to start the AUX tone, which would start the next song...and continue playing (both my voice and the actual song until I released the button) which would stop my voice cart and allow the song to continue playing, thus queue up my next voice clip for the next segment. It actually sounds much more confusing that it is. So many times I had to re-record because I didn't completely erase the cart, removing that AUX tone, and it kept starting the music reals before they were supposed to.. And that AUX tone (you call it a cue tone) could be heard if you listened real close. Kind of a "brrrrrrrrrrrp" sound. Kind of sounded like your radio just farted.
Gawd I miss working in radio.
So THAT"S how those awful radio stations worked! I was driven to alternative college & community radio in the early 1970s. Jingles come from the Devil, straight from the Bowels of Hell! Weird, finally being able to see the Devil's equipment, LMAO!!! Having Homo Sapiens in the station to play CDs & records is a cool concept.
Love it! "real to real machines". Priceless :)
@@thomasmezei3231 through the unreality of the human mind.
That sounds magical. I started in radio in 2009 which was the worst time to start in the history of the industry. Would have been amazing to work back in the day. Still loved it though. Did my own version of what you did. I would "voicetrack" my four hour midday show in about 30 minutes and then spend the rest of my day producing commercials and imaging. Left after two years when i realized I could make about 10x $$ as a programmer. Industry is a shambles. Sad.
I still work in radio (started in the late 90s) and I'm very grateful for computers. I jumped in to explain program vs spot carts and programming departments etc etc but you did it for me and much better than I could have. I DO NOT MISS CARTS! Having working in a programming department, I do not miss making carts. Mind you, 90% of radio jobs are completely redundant these days. Radio stations certainly aren't the dynamic workplaces they used to be.
I have no problem with these kind of adverts.
I'm really pleased that TechMoan is growing so large. He certainly deserves it.
I agree, some of this tech is expensive, the more techmoan can buy, the more we can watch.
l agree with you both :)
Exactly!
Growing so large.
Growing large usually means monetizing, begging for subs, giveaways, and more but lower quality content. My favorite example is Cinemassacre. I used to adore that channel, now I can't stand it. I'm not saying that's happened to Techmoan yet, but it could.
I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE
The Prodigy
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - I bought the single...
....LORD OF THE GAME
"I'll see you burn!!"
fuck that im the lord of the game, i rule this empire.
Memories. My job as a sound engineer in TV in the 80's involved a three player stack cart machine and a wall rack covered with sound effects carts. Our news at the time was shot on film and a lot of was 'mute' (no sound) so we had to add effects live on air with about 20 seconds to prepare. The capacity for hilarious mistakes (accidental and deliberate) was legendary. Then along came video news cameras in the mid 80s and spoilt all the fun.
Our local radio station used to do everything on these carts. They rarely would play records live on air, and the studio was set up to mix and play from several cart machines for music, ads and jingles. As each cart was ready to go, there was no fumbling or time wasting, and the result was a pretty slick operation even though this was a very small station.
At night the entire studio was automated, with sets of 24 cart rotating carousels loaded with music and ads playing pre-programmed sequences for 6 hours. Old carousels pop up on Ebay now and then.
Hello Clive... 4:44
360MIX i was looking for this comment xd
4:48 Someone's been watching bigclivedotcom 👀
Menwith Films
???
He does electronics teardown videos, pretty often using a Quicktest device like that one.
A great channel by the way, entertaining, funny, and oftentimes even educational.
My GOD, what memories. I must have rewound 10,000 carts during my career. What memories. Thanks for having this and the one on the RCA large cassette machine.
Cart machines were daily tools in my career in radio. Spotmasters Tapecasters, and ITCs are the most rugged pieces of gear I can think of. You can imagine the amount of abuse these things weathered day in day out for decades.
"I AM THE GOD OF HELL FIRE AND I BRING YOU!"
Kenny lynn
Panda Gaming lmao this got me too
For those who will be looking for this
19:20
The original source for that audio - minus the Kenny Lynn bit - is the song Fire by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1968)
@@simony1210 this song was made famous recenlty for its cameo in the christchurch shooting livestream
That was a big The Prodigy throwback for me.
BITD Kenny Lyn record shop, 20 York Place, Brighton.
During the Saturday Night Fever craze Kenny Lyn took over the Birds Nest (then called Dalrymples) and turned it into Mr K’s, it had Brighton’s first lit up dance floor.
The cart with the Penny Lyn material is a Marathon brand cart.The radio station chain I worked used these carts-for everything from jingles,ads,and music.The Marathon company supplied carts to museum display sound systems.We also "rebuilt" these carts ourselves at the station-cleaned them out and reloaded with fresh tape and those pressure pads.Stereo carts often had phasing problems between the channels-the program would fade in and out on mono radios-esp AM.The Marathon carts were more consistent in solving this problem.
19:10 - that strange feeling when you're born in 1992, but somehow feel like you know that sound really well and life would be much better during that time period. Just...it sounds like people enjoyed everything much more than nowadays.
18:50 that's just what I've been looking for! I run a post-apocalyptic role-playing game for some friends and I wanted them to stumble upon an abandoned radio station building that's been playing some creepy music on a loop for the last 20 years.
Great memories! I work in radio and loved this format. And yes, it was very common for station to everything on cart (all music included).
I work at a local talk radio station near me, and the computer system is very simular to the later cart systems (even found a Cart from the late 90s in a drawer, and also they still have a minidisc player in the rack), the system is all manual (plugging in commercials into a slot, and it runs off Windows XP). They are switching to a new system right now.
Have found some info on Kenny Lyn / Kenny Lynn / Kennylyn. He was a popular mobile DJ and had a residency at Sherry's in Brighton in the 1970s. He owned a record shop in Brighton in the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s in York Place Brighton, just around the corner from the technical college. Kenny was said to resemble Harry Enfield's "scouse character" like the footballer Terry McDermott.
I'm 17 years old again at a small AM radio station in 1983. Thanks for the memories! EDIT: THe Fidelipack cart! With the silly metal arm that helped keep the roll uh, rolled up. I'd taken a lot of these apart to fix rattling wire arms!
I was 17 in 1977 but I hear you! Got me a test tape and went around the state making nice change aligning cart decks.
Lol, I'd forgotten the rattle. Thanks for the memory.
In 1999 the radio station I worked for still used carts. By 2001 the station moved and started using computers. There was a "harddrive" cart machine that was of course used ,from some other station. There was a DOS automation computer system,that had to be updated for Y2k!
Aaron Z Yeah lots of stations kept them for quite a while. I had a DOS automation system that was floppy based, running on an IBM PC that I played with as a kid, along with several cart carousels. Fun times.
Many stations phased them out for the DAMMS digital cart system - A computer the size of a room was installed in engineering and a small white controller was added in the studio. This was about the time national adverts were delivered to the station via DAT Tapes too!
I worked in radio from 96-2000, at a mid level station that never made all that much money. Carts were still used for almost all content, all the carts and machines felt pretty old at the time. Planning for the digital transformation was just starting when I left.
I remember those days of radio when those carts ruled the music radio airwaves.
Cuing up records on turntables was a diminishing artform by the 1980s. But, I did have a friend that worked as a radio presenter in the early 1980s (back then called disc-jockey) where the station abandoned the music carts to vinyl LPs when the format went from contemporary hits to album oriented Rock (AOR). The cuing up of the vinyl records didn't always go smoothly.
I remember those Radio 1 jingles. Definitely 1970s. Maybe you should email a recording to them for their nostalgia cupboard. There's only Tony Blackburn and Steve Wright left from that era, and they're on Radio Quiet now.
Kenny is the man, whoever he is.
There was a digital successor to the tape cart, believe it or not there was a floppy disk cart system! I worked at a station that still had one in use in the early 2000's in the production studio. As I recall it wasn't quite full CD sample rate but sounded good enough.
Steve Wright liked carts so much that he used minidiscs in the same fashion. When Radio 2 moved studios about 12 years ago they had to put a minidisc player in for "Love The Show" to use.
Demon CD machines! It was basically just a CD in a cart
Back in the mid-80's, I toured a Canadian radio broadcast station (CHAB, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan) - their entire library was carts, they had one room that was basically a giant cart server room, and (if memory serves) some form of computer interface in the DJ room, that would control the carts (think CD changer on steroids...) In the thirty years since then, this is the ONLY time I've ever seen any reference to the Cart format. Cool vid, :-)
I toured CHAB/Moose Jaw in 1995. By that time, the station was playing music off of CD but cart's were still being used for jingles, commercials, etc. I myself started working in radio in 2000 and cart's were still very much in use for newscast audio clips and daily features. By mid-2001, everything was switched to digital and the cart decks were retired.
I was an engineer at WKHY in the mid-1980s. We used almost exclusively carts on-air, songs, commercials, jingles, etc. In the main control room, we had 2 3-slot ITC 3D machines, 6 slots total. We had a "wall of music" with over 700 songs, 1 per cart, and a rotating rack with about 200 commercial and other carts. We had an ITC 99 cart recorder in the production, along with Otari MX5050 stereo and 4-track RtoR, and turntables. The biggest reliability problem was the Jones plugs on the back of the 3D cart machines. They were not designed for audio signals, and had to be cycled every month or the would randomly loose contact. An engineer at another station solved this problem at his station by disassembling the connectors and gold-plating the pins.
The DJ having his little harem is one of the creepiest things I've ever heard from an old, long-lost tape.
The Kenny Lynn jingles are catchy! I hope someone is able to unearth more details about his show!
There was a soundbit from Arthur Brown - Fire. (I am the god of hellfire and i bring you..) that song came out in 1968 so that narrows the timeperiod down pretty good.
PcKaffe So anywhere between 1968 and 2017 then.
Well this is radio we are talking about, they tend to keep to the trends. So it's very likely that it's just after 68.
John Francis Doe well it’s a mono tape and most studios around the 2000s started switching to completely automated queue systems.. plus there’s obviously some progressive rock style going there so I would say 69-75 would be the era.
My dad was a morning-drive DJ for most of my life. Hearing those Radio 1 jingles made my heart long to go back in time when as I boy in the early 70's, I would go to work with him during the summer. They sounded so much like the PAMS jingles used in the US back then. Thanks!
Long live the Spotmaster "tub" cart machines-they were simple,reliable,and easy to work on if they broke.They had either tubed or early germanium solid state Rce/Pb amps and cue boards.If a cart cues OK on one machine but not another-the head alignment is out or the caps on the cue board need to be replaced.Cart failures at the station I worked at one failed so bad it tripped the AM transmitter modulator Overloads!
loved the Kenny Lynn "impression"! great video! absolutely love this channel!
Regarding the carts with music; They used these carts in the radio station my dad maintained in the early 90s in Western Australia for their fully automated robotic system for ads, jingles AND music. The system was very old by that stage (it had a paper tape reader on it for programming, though not in use by this stage), it had two banks each with a robotic X/Y mechanism for picking and placing tapes from it's respective library into one of it's several cart machines in the bottom row (see the scene from 'Hackers' but for these carts instead of video tapes). From memory it was called "M.A.R.V.I.N.". Those music carts you have may be from a similar system.
Those Echomatic cartridges were made in my hometown! I've never heard of them; I seem to learn something new all the time about Toledo. There are tons of people named Cousino here and even several other businesses that use the name. I can't find a trace of this companies existence left except a small blurb on wikipedia about the inventor and an address that doesn't match any current building.
Great work as usual Techmoan. I went down the rabbit hole: Kenny Lynn -> Frank Pourcel -> David McWilliams' original version of 'Days of Pearly Spencer' and have been listening to that endlessly since yesterday. Can't believe I've never heard it before. What a tune!
This is awesome. I'm a bit obsessed with jingles, they used to creep me out as a kid with all the layered harmonies and stuff.
did Big Clive tell you to get one of those testers? haha
The bit where you do your Kenny Lynn impression (with the creepy lady jingle) reminds me of a bit in Alan Partridge where DJ Dave Clifton's "nightclub" radio show consists of pre-recorded lady sounds played out on cue!
Anyway, really interesting stuff! Fantastic video as always!
I was told once (by an inebriated ex-broadcast engineer who'd been laid off) that TV commercials played out on ITV and Channel 4 were also played out on cartridges. I haven't found any evidence of this though.
I now finally know what all those racks were full of in the background of Frasier when he was in the studio.
Your voice always reminds me of James May meets Ashens presenting us with technology.
Lol ~ great comparison.
"Resort" to sponsorship? Guys, he is getting paid to make the videos we like by companies who do not have a stake in the products he covers. More money means more time he can put into the videos (or not--for his back catalog alone he deserves to rake in some) and a better end product for us (for flippin free!)
plus all this vintage audio stuff costs hundreds, which i doubt he makes back (or only just does) off youtube preroll and banner ads
alex E yup, totally
alex E he deserves it
I used a spotmaster like that for on air production use back in 1964. It took a beating. But it worked flawlessly.
and after 1,000,000 machines, we finally get to hear the large tape play at the proper speed. NICE I LIKE!
Used one of these when I had an AFRTS (armed forces radio) radio show on the USS John F. Kennedy. Thanks for the walk down memory lane.
I was lucky enough to work as a board operator and weather announcer for a radio station when I was a teenager in the 80s so this really brings back memories!
It doesn’t surprise me that many carts were blank. It was standard practice at our station to have an intern or low paid worker like me to blank out carts. The device to blank them out was just a huge magnet. You would just hold a button and swipe the cart around on the surface.
I returned to radio in 2001 and by then all of the carts were gone and everything was digital, which was way more convenient but also not as much fun. It was a challenge to start those carts in a way to make the station sound tight.
Great to see an old Cart Machine. They could be bloody noisy at times. When I was training in radio, the school had all music tracks on cart, as well as Carts with jingles and ads.
Our station just threw everything in the tip when the technology became obsolete. One of my jobs was to replace worn out tape with new stock.
Another fun and interesting video. Techmoan is one of my favorite channels. Proud to be a Patron of the channel.
A big reason for songs on carts wasn't just to make it easier for DJs to cue songs, but also so you could automated a whole nights' airplay without needing a DJ at all.
Zzyzx Wolfe How would that work? Someone would still need to change the cart once the song had finished.
They had cart libraries that could automagically exchange the carts. You can see one in action here: ruclips.net/video/9fTJkVgRvpw/видео.html
Zzyzx Wolfe now they have software that automates the stations. The playlist of songs is loaded, and the DJ records a few things and just inserts them. The commercials are loaded in, and the computer just plays that. I read an article a while back about 1 DJ can be used for multiple radio stations in multi markets! It’s pretty sad really. There are a few stations in the Bay Area that don’t have DJ’s. There is one called “Bob” where there is a Generic DJ guy who talks about “Bob” in 3 person!
Yeah, Clear Channel/iHeartRadio often has the same programming on their Top 40 stations across the nation.
My dad worked as a DJ at a radio station for most of his life. I remember watching him use these and all the tapes and recording commercials (When I went to work with him!)... Very nostalgic!
11:18 - I'd never thought I would heard either Donald Duck or even Alvin and the Chipmunks sing a Jimmy Smith song. 😂🤣😂🤣
Clever idea adding the SquareSpace to your clock :)
It's the attention to details what makes the difference
The Kenny Lynn Show must be uncovered
We must find it, perhaps tape recordings of it. I can't sleep now...
that tape is haunted. i wouldn't look too close into it if i were you.
Found a place selling tickets for "Kenny Lynn's Something Old, Something New DJ Flashback" which sounds like a promising lead: www.ents24.com/bradford-events/idle-and-thackley-conservative-club/kenny-lynns-something-old-something-new/1073843142
A bit of googling turns up references to a club DJ called Kenny Lyn, in the 70's in Brighton, at a venue called Sherry's Dance Hall, and also Mr K's. The place may possibly now be called The Manhattan.
you guys are all going to regret this. once you know the truth there's no going back.
We still have these at WRUW-FM 91.1 Cleveland. Nobody uses them anymore on a daily basis but we're celebrating out 50th anniversary and need some of this old material.
Cool video! If you're ever in Cleveland, OH and want to play with a "proper" radio station...
This brings back memories. Back in 1990 I discovered a bunch of stuff that had been taken out of a small radio station in 1973. There were a few pieces of equipment, along with boxes of carts and reel to reel tapes. The equipment was all made in the 1950s and included a couple of full track ¼" reel to reel recorders designed for mounting in an equipment rack, with the electronics (with octal base tubes and a very rugged and heavy design) in one unit and the mechanism in a separate unit. I found the manual for one of these machines, and the specs were quite impressive for the time, as these were true high-fidelity machines. There was also a cart machine which was for playback only, it was a very simple machine with a lever on the right like yours. I was able to use it to listen to some of the carts and discovered the cue signal on one track with the program signal on the other. The machine had an output for the cue track but didn’t have any internal cuing mechanism, so I assume it used an external cuing unit. Many of the carts had multiple spots on them with a cue signal at the start of each one. There were a lot of commercials on short reel to reel tapes, and I assumed that these would normally be dubbed onto carts for broadcasting, then when the time for the ad was over, the cart would be erased and used to record another spot or several related spots. Usually these multiple related spots would be found on one reel to reel tape, recorded one after another. I didn’t find any music to speak of, other than jingles and such, but I did find a DJ demo recorded on a reel to reel, where a DJ at the station had recorded several times the end of one song, his announcements, and the beginning of the next song. Presumably the DJ made the tape as part of an effort to find a job at another radio station. The unique sound of the beginning and end of each recorded spot told me the demo was recorded on one of the machines I was using to play the tape, or an identical model. It was interesting to hear portions of songs that were current at the time, which was 1973, the year the station removed their 1950s era equipment and replaced it with new equipment.
i've got to say, i just absolutely LOVE your enthusiasm... i would LOVE to do what you do, but i doubt i'd have the energy to execute it nearly as well as you consistently do... i tip my hat to you, good sir!
Back in the 80's a local radio station(Phoenix, AZ), was playing a cart to death. It was Duran Duran's, "Wild Boys", it was putting out it's death throws for about a week, until it finally self destructed on the air. I only wish I had the sense then to record it.
Sad, that would've been great to hear!
If I were a cassette made to record Duran Duran I'd probably kill myself too.
unless it was Rio, then I'd allow it.
Max Mills That's why they put music on carts, so they didn't wear out the records, and eventually, CDs by playing them so much. Especially on pop radio / CHR !
Filming In Portland, how can you wear out a CD by playing it, its data being picked up by an optical tracking system, nothing touches the data, the machine will wear out, and you can break or scratch the disc but you cant wear out a disc just by playing it
@@compzac Both of you are right for slightly different reasons, CDs suffer "wear" from handling rather than actual playing. same with records, accumulation of scratches from being handled repeatedly and with less care over time killed more records than were actualy worn out by the stylus. If a radio station is going to "burn up" a new recording (As is/was usual in the first weeks of a new,hot Top 40 tune.), Better to use a "cheap" tape dub.
These machines were also used in TV and movie production. For instance, when David Letterman used to throw his little cue cards through the rear "window" and you would hear an actual window break, that was a guy with a fast finger sitting in the control room. The effect was on a 10-second card so it just keep re-cueing over and over. Also, when you hear car tires screeching or screams, those are carted sound effects used as sweetening in post production.
I've never seen a jingle machine this old before. Thanks for this video!
I have several boxes of cartridges from our community radio station here in Ulm. Unfortunately none of or old cart machines is working anymore.
hope you can find someone to donate a working machine or repair an old one so you can convert those bits of your local history to something accessible!
Techmoan, I wonder if you have ever run across a continuous carousel cart player? In the 1960's, I had a friend who DJ'd at a FM station and I saw his setup. The station was semi-automated, quite progressive for the time, and was in two small rooms in an office building. The main room, about the size of a large bathroom, housed 2 carousel cart players; each carousel could hold a few dozen carts in a horizontal-axis wheel arrangement. They could be programmed to play cart #1 from Carousel #1, then cart #1 from Carousel #2, than back to Carousel #1, which had finished advancing the previous cart and cued up the next. Each time the switch was made from one Carousel to the next, the wheel rotated one notch, and eventually made it back to the beginning. Carts could be inserted and removed at any place on the wheel, and the rotator skipped over empty spots. The DJ could pause the system to make a live announcement, but rarely did. Most DJ chatter was pre-recorded, even the time announcements.
I'm not sure what kind of carts these were, but it was an FM station, so they probably held stereo tracks.
I worked at an automated FM station. We had our music on open-reel machines, but the commercials were on carts in rotating sequential carousels like you described. They later upgraded to allow four carousels that allowed random searching for a particular cart.Time checks were on a dedicated cart machine that advanced one track each minute so that it played the correct time when called upon by the sequencer. One announcer accidentally recorded a 30-second spot on a 5-minute cart. It took so long for it to advance and rotate that it threw the whole system out of sequence every time it played.
Shermanbay I got a few of those from a local radio station just after they went all computerized, in 1995 or 1996. I played with them for a while, but never got it working. Came with the original IBM PC (from 1981) that ran the thing (though the carousels might have been older than that). Very fun for a kid who loved radio to play with.
Also got endless varieties of old carts and 5" reels from radio stations who threw them out to play with. Fun fun! At least I had a broadcast reel to reel deck to play the reels on (an old Magnecord from 1967 with 7.5 and 15 ips - sounded FANTASTIC!).
I could have scored all sorts of very nice Ampex reel decks from one station in eastern Washington who had gone digital. I got there a couple weeks to late - they threw them all in the garbage!!! Those go for literally _thousands_ of dollars, as they were high end decks. Way nicer than small town radio should have.
Also remember when our old movie theater threw out their original tube amps from 1946 when they went modern in 1997. I WISH I took them from the garbage heap, as there was some very nice stuff in there. Even some Altec tube amps, those green face models that are so nice, that studios still use now! The LDS church likes to use them for their chapel organs too, even now, because they sound so good (they always have great sound systems for speech and organ music).
Big DogCountry ok so THAT is how he did it pre-computer! I only ever saw the ones with the original IBM PC's (floppy only) running them. That's what the one I had to play with had. Which I think had the same BE carousels as that picture had. BE was everywhere!! Love the look and feel of the big, old analog equipment. Love using it in the studio when I can (recording studio). Still prefer the sound and limitations it imposed on the recording process. Pro tools has NOT advanced the actual art of music production.
I like to use my external hard disk multitrack from 2001 - the old tascam MX-2424. The transport works and feels like a reel to reel, so you can use it like that during recording to limit the distraction of pro tools and DAWs. Still sounds fantastic at 24/96. And you don't have to worry about computer crashes, viruses, plugins, licensing, updating the OS and every plugin to go with it, constant version upgrades, etc. Hit record and it's recording, every time. Bulletproof! 9 and 18 GB UW SCSI drives are getting harder to find, though :(
Big Country, I can't see that image!
Radio England, or Swinging Radio England, an American owned offshore radio station had a Carousel installed on their ship in 1966, way before the BBC got tech equipment like that.
I had a 8 track jingle machine called q-tone(I think) used it on a few discos I did in the 80s. Unfortunately the jingles weren't always appropriate like'I like it...Slow' in a suductive 70s lady voice. Made a few first dance wedding couples look stare at me. Great video
When I was starting college in 1965, Muntz came out with a car stereo that was based on the cart machine. It ran at 3-3/4ips and had four track playing half an LP on the A set of stereo tracks with the B set for the flip side of the record. Within about a year, RCA came out with the 8-track. The limitation of the 8-track was that about half-way through the record side, often in the middle of a tune, the sound stopped, a metal backed splicing tape ran across a sensing probe and the head dropped down to play the next set of tracks. Also, if there was a problem, the plastic case was hard to open and wouldn't really seal if you managed to fix the problem. Also, in the heat of the car, the rubber of the built-in pinch roller would deform if you left the cart in the machine. That meant you tossed the tape. The 4-track had, as on your machine, a pinch roller that the user could remove and replace. With RCA's marketing power, the 4-track for the car went bye-bye. Later, when I started working in a radio station, the cart decks were the way we played the commercials. They were fired when that source was selected on the mixing board and the operator pushed a button adjacent to the volume control, the same way we started the record turntables. The broadcast versions, as you pointed out, played at 7-1/2ips. They also put a cue tone on the separate track when you started the machine in record. There is a circuit in the output of the cue track that senses the cue and stops the tape. The person wanting to record several cuts would start a record, stop the machine manually after the spot, get the script and music ready to record the next spot and start recording when they were ready. Each recording had a separate cue tone and would stop the tape before the next spot making it ready to air the next time.
One thing I would suggest for your machine is to check the output of the cue channel at the head and if it is outputting there, then the trigger circuit is malfunctioning.
Anyway, thanks for the memories.
Awesome video! Don't listen to the haters, there's no problem with you making some money on a video you've been preparing for weeks and planning for months.
18:50 the way they say their names reminds me of the Pink Windmill Kids
I was a radio deejay back in the 1980s, and my radio station used carts for records. Some stations would put all or nearly all of their playlist onto carts, but my station was not rich enough to do that. Instead, we put our hot rotation hits on cartridge, as a way of preserving the vinyl records. We had twelve hot rotation songs at any given time, and they’d all be on cart. Each week, a part-timer would come in, check the latest station hit record chart and erase / record whatever carts needed changing so that that week’s hot songs could all be played from cart.
And that brings up a trick we discovered for fixing color accuracy on CRTs. The Atari 2600 game machine was all the rage in those days, and anyone old enough may remember that those devices could really fuck up the color on your TV set. Having the set repaired at a TV fix-it shop was expensive. Someone figured out that you could take the cart eraser, a hand-held electromagnet, hold it up to the TV screen, make a spiral motion at a certain distance and fix the color on the TV. The station manager would often allow us to “check out” the eraser and take it home overnight, to fix our TVs, and bring it back the next day.
So cool! I’ve always wondered how these cart machines worked
The scene with Paul Newman is from Harper (1967) for those interested
The song playing is called Mexican Breakfast
That Kenny Lyn outro really tickled me. Goodnight Maureen!
Thanx so much for this. We used carts like this quite a lot on the stations at which I worked in the 1980's. The big carts were used in slightly different decks as delays for Racing Control (horsies) & Sports Roundup. There was an extra head at the left hand side. It's a pity your machine doesn't stop - it should - it has the heads to do it but the beep doesn't seem to do what it's supposed to. There was a different frequency beep - 150Hz I think - which had two functions. This was set at the end of the programme/jingle. When the beep started it energised an external relay which "pushed" the play button of another deck. When the beep ended, the capstan sped up thus fast forwarding the tape back to the stop beep. Good system but its maintenance was high by today's standards. Thanx again,
John Roberts
Wellington
New Zealand.
I absolutely adore those jingles! They're just little hidden treasures, quite cool that after all these years they've been heard again. :)
Won't mention the name, but a northern radio station I worked at was still using carts until 2000! We used two sonifex decks - one to record, and one with two players plus a separate erase. Worth mentioning there were three types of cues - Primary cues were at the start of a recording, secondary cues were inserted at the end and a tertionary cue triggered deck 2 to start once deck 1 cued. This is how our jingles could fill any time needed as there was the primary "You're listening to Mikeapollo FM", the secondary (which was your instrumental loop on a second cart) then your tertionary cue as the outro "on 10 46 fm" so playback would start on deck 1 cart 1, cue to cart 2 on deck 1 then once you hit cue again would flip back to cart 1 and the outro.
Really nice kit, we upgraded to DART (disk based) systems in 2000 just before I left radio :)
Mike Holbrough Lots of stations still used carts, and especially CDs, well into the 90's and sometimes early 00's. especially in America where we have so many stations, including many smaller markets without a budget (or big markets with cheapskate owners like Clear Channel) who saw no need to replace something that worked. Until they decided to try all automation on each station by going all computerized, and sometimes switching to live assist when automation drove away listeners.
Also even after computer automation took over with its WAV file spots and liners, they still often used CDs for music, either Denon CD carts or carousels. Some even still used the reel to reels of older music in conjunction with WAV file playback of computer automation for a while, so they didn't have to replace all their existing music or record it all into the computer. It took quite a few more years until all the stations finished that transition.
Here I am a 23 year old young adult watching a middle aged man reviewing something I have no idea about and never had experience with while drinking my tea at the kitchen table.
AirsoftWarfareHD What a fascinating life story.
Who gives a fuck? And what has age got to do with anything??
Everybody loves a bit of techmoan, it's so relaxing watching his videos. He's the David Attenborough of technology.
I'm 13. You're not that special
and you're half as special.
A very good friend of mine was a radio DJ and lord knows how many hours I spent with her in the studio. She'd be playing the baseball game and load the machine so it would play the commercials when it was cued by the mother office. Thanks for showing me this souvenir of my youth.
Back in 1969, I found a 4-track home recording deck at a yard sale. It was a dead format even then. I added a handmade cueing head that could sense a foil patch stuck on the tape, then built an elaborate relay-based control circuit, and added a standard cassette recorder. Presto! I had my own telephone answering machine at a time when the only other way to have one was to lease it from the telephone company. A year or so after that, I started working in broadcasting and spent way more time juggling carts than I care to remember.
I loved this. I used carts at a radio station a long time ago. I miss them - they were convenient. Great memories. I marvel at how easily you repair these and other technical items. There's this woman called Rinoa Supergenius who also repairs older tech on her channel. She's good enough you might find her interesting.
Flojoe6274 I'll check her out, thanks! Fellow woman techie, after my own heart.
I loved analog tape too. Wish I could find an excuse to run a radio station using turntables, carts and Denon CD carts, with analog console. When DJs actually were DJs :)
Whoah, I never would have expected the tape to be a Mobius strip! Also, that Wednesday song is BANANAS!
Trained on them in journalism school in the early 80s, used them in our radio show every week... trained students on them when I taught journalism in the early 90s. While working at the public broadcaster here in Canada in the early 90s, management swapped them out with DAT floppies, stacking the drives in the same way we used to stack CART drives. The amount of money the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation squandered chasing this technology through the 90s was stupendous. Heaven knows what happened to all the discarded Tech afterwards.
I’ve finally figured out what Frasier was using all those years. I always just thought it was an eight track!
20:33 I do hear a male voice immediately after the female voice says "goodnight darling" but it is very, very low. My mind could have been playing tricks on me though. I have my earplugs on while listen to your channel all the time :-)
Luis Donado I hear it too.
As he said, this is probably a bleed from an earlier recording.
Usually they recorded a dialogue with a backup actor/director and the actor in the actual mic. Then the radio DJ would fill between
lines with his own voice. I still notice that on some radio spots and jingles here in Brazil. To simulate a conversation, you know.
I do believe your hearing lyrics to the song that is being spoken over.
I heard it
Can you start using that jingle you made for all of your video intros, and use the Kenny Lynn outro as your outro music? I really like that music and the woman saying good night.
Last one of these I saw was at 1380 on the AM I do not remember the call letters. Everett WA. Early 70's. Was a stack I think eight high. All the ads were on it.
A friend of mine was a radio DJ in the 70s-80s, whenever theywould get 45s pressed on styrene (from Columbia, Warner Bros. and other labels that had their 45s pressed at those two) they would immediately transfer them to carts, otherwise after about 3 plays with backcues under a heavy broadcast tone arm they were totally worn out.
I visited WJBR (one of the oldest FM stations in the US, first to broadcast all-stereo and later all-CD) with a scout troop in the late 90s and one of their employees demonstrated producing a commercial, including sound effect CDs, open reel tape, a voice processor, and of course carts (including a bulk-eraser...just a big electromagnet, drag all 6 sides of the cart across it, it's erased). Just a year or two later there was an article in the local paper about how they had switched to doing all of that on computers.
This is the best channel on RUclips, bar none.
Way back when, when I was in broadcasting, one of my jobs was replacing worn out pads and rewinding the carts.
I know that I wound thousands of them over twenty years, among other things a tech did at radio stations back then.
It's all computerized now! Carts and cart machines have gone extinct.
I'm a former radio DJ turned broadcast engineer. I was using carts to actually broadcast with until around 2004 (although this was a rarity) and kept the format around as an enthusiast until I had a purge of my shed a few years ago. I skipped an obscene amount of great broadcast gear and my crown jewel was my Sonifex cart player/recorder of the last model they made and the Rolls-Royce of all cart machines. The standardised name worldwide for this format became known as the "NAB" Cart or cartridge. Fidelipac was a brand name of one of the original manufacturers.
Steve Wright on BBC Radio 2 incidentally, kept using carts in his studio until only a very few years ago until he could no longer fight off the BBCs insistence that all studios were standardised. When they asked him for the masters to all his jingles so they could digitise them into the systems, he refused and told them they would have to digitise from his working cartridges as nothing else sounded "radio" enough. You can clearly hear that many of his jingles are digitised from some well used carts, especially his opening theme.
During the 60s and 70s, the industry standard cartridge machines in the UK were ITC machines but in the late 70s, the Sonifex machines started to emerge, these became the dominant machines during the 80s and 90s right up until the final demise of the format. There were of course many other manufacturers but at the time before carts started being replaced by digital systems in the mid-90s it would have been rare to have seen anything other than Sonifex machines in most UK radio stations.
The pinch roller deployment later happened automatically upon insertion of the cartridge and of course most machines from the 70s onwards were stereo (in fact 4 track, 2 tracks for music, 1 for the cue tones and the fourth carried what were known as "tertiary" tones which were used in automated setups where these could be used to trigger other cart machines, tape machines or other equipment.
It was common, especially in the US for ALL played material to be done via carts, many radio studios would have consisted of only 2 triple stack cart machines for all media playback. This was considered neat and convenient at the time and also meant that the precious records only needed to be played occasionally when being recorded to the carts. The 80s Pirate station Laser 558, which was run by an American company and styled on American radio, with American DJs, played entirely from carts, not only because this was very much a norm in US radio but also as it was felt that there were too many potential pitfalls playing records on a turntable in stormy weather.
NAB carts were also widely used in the TV industry, for very similar applications to their use in radio, especially during live or "as live" TV shows such as quiz shows where intros, outros, sound effects etc were required to be accessed and played quickly. The uptake of more advanced and digital systems was much quicker in the TV industry than with Radio which had a much more romantic affinity with the analogue NAB format whereas TV was quick to adopt newer technologies such as digital cart systems (using floppy disks and later Zip disks), and eventually Hard-Disk and network based systems.
NAB machines are still available on the second hand market today but they tend not to appear very often on auction sites like eBay but more commonly on specialised sites dealing in vintage broadcast equipment.
remember them very well. And yes, many stations did record records on the tapes just to make life easier for the DJ. This saved the turntables for older records. Many times shows you had "rights" to broadcast ("Casey Kasem American Top 40" for example) came on two 33 1/3 LPs which would be played on the turntables and you would cue up the ads, which were on the carts.
Hey Techmoan, gratz on 500k!! That's a whole heck of a lot!!
See you at a million~ :D
Thanks...I hope I'm here then.
Techmoan over 1,000 comments in 2 days ?!? U in the Big-Tyme Now ! 😎
Techmoan oh you will!!!!!