The Japanese electronics industry went all-in on Plasma technology in the 1990's, with lots of government funded R&D. LCD displays then got cheap and ate their lunch. The information displays in Japanese train stations and airports used to use similar displays. They must have been expensive but could display very bright and sharp text compared to LED and flipdot signs.
Every Radio Sweden control room/studio I've worked in, had those RTW meters. It was certainly the most important item in the whole room; no audio engineer would ever risk being too loud in national radio! I just love watching them!
How about the Danish NTP meters. That was what I started out using 1981. I always claimed it to be a must to have somewhere in your angle of view since it so clearly alerted me for playing to loud.
Yes, RTW 1206 meters are professional (and extremely sturdy) gear. I've used them for years in edit suites, broadcast vans, etc. Hold on to it. It's worth every penny.
@@jamescollins6085 They last almost forever. In 30 years I've never seen one break down, let me put it like that. Where to find one? Apart from the obvious Ebay, try local radio studios and things like that. They may have changed to computer/DAW based meters...
my rtw 1206 has been part of my studio for around 25years and still faultless, useful and relevant to this day :) amazed to see you feature one tbh matt, great stuff :)
We all did get used to the CRT whine but it was still noticeable to an extent. I remember when I'd been out for the day/night I could hear/sense the crt whine coming from a distant TV as soon as I opened the front door, even if you couldn't hear the sound of the TV show being watched. Thinking about it I got some level of comfort from it, you knew your Mum or loved one was home and was up waiting for you to return. You knew someone was home without a word being spoken.
related to the end of the video: I love CRT whine. When I was younger, I could always tell when someone turned on a tv anywhere in the house. It also gave me the ability to predict when it was going to be a "movie day" at school because I could hear the TV on in the back room... frequently also meant that there would be a substitute teacher that day lol
About 20 years ago, I could walk down the street and I could tell which houses were watching television even though you couldn't hear the audio outside, just from that high pitched signal.
FYI you can tell the approximate vintage of the RTW meter (and most other bits of kit) by the date code on, eg, the chip at the top right at 11:02. '9030' = 30th week of 1990.
The "Made In West Germany" sticker is a less accurate measurement if they had lots of stickers left over, and German law wasn't altered to make them stop using them.
Yeah, but mr. Moanie got it wrong! Thursday is ruled by Jupiter, and it's associated colour is yellow. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if he deliberately gave wrong information, as it seems he's being controlled by external forces...
In former Czechoslovakia were produced modulometers with moving mirrors (for stereo). It gave them speed to be proper peak meters. Some designer had an idea use them in locomotives as indicators of preset and current speed. When sun shone into cabin you couldn't see anything.
I think the CRT whine is around 15-16kHz, so you're not getting the same whine from your tinnitus. The demise of the CRT just means one fewer whine for you to put up with.
We were making cool Jumbo led level meters for the stereo in our room or in the car when we were 10 yrs old. Of course most normal kids didn't get a new soldering iron for Christmas. But we knew how to build circuits. And in the level meter ended up on a hat with a radio and a phone. As siblings it became a competition to see who could make the coolest hat. Fond memories 😊
I have a RTW similar to this one but with digital AES inputs and I love it. Watching it while listening to music is quite relaxing! Thank you so much for your videos!
My favorite vu meters was the fluorescent meters of Technics RS-M253X and the analog meters in Sony TC-K4 cassette deck. In my teens I was never tired watching them while playing cassettes on those decks.
That's a really excellent point as it would work well in my cars burnt out clock and ironically for this channel, it would work well as a bright date and time for a dashcam, but is the best time to take in a spectrum analyzer while driving? Sounds like a good way to crash to me, lol
Back in the 90s, when I started my first electronics course I was fascinated with audio circuits and the VU meters was the coolest project to show to other kids in school hahaha. Still have my LM3915 Pcb somewere
Great little bit of creative work to show about the high frequencies of the old Electronics. That bit of sound at the very end was really funny to me. But I guess those of us that are a bit older know those sounds well LOL. Thanks!
Another great puppet sketch! I could always hear that sound from our old CRTs, I don't miss it, but it also never bothered me much because it was soon drowned out by whatever I was watching.
Fat chance. Metric was phased out ahead of Brexit. Fear not though, you can still use feet, inches, yards, shaftments, cubits, paces, ells, digits, palms, or fathoms.
My uncle worked at Arena Synchron Studios in West-Berlin and I am pretty sure to remember seeing a 1206 device sitting on top of his mixer when I visited him in the studio in about 1987. Next time I see him, I'll surely ask him about that. Anyway thanks for bringing up those memories. Greetings from Germany, Lars
In the early 80's, when my Dad was still HEAVILY in to his hi-fi gear, he used to love making amps and would always put a spectrum analyser on to the few amps that he made for himself and I remember sitting next to his gear as he played something like ELO or The Beatles and him always reminded my not to jump around too much to ensure the stylus didn't jump and telling my to look at the lights move to the sound!
Wow! I have not seen one of those tube based VU meters (Top right image 0:21) since the early 70's when we had one in an old reel to reel tape deck. Fantastic!
Well, that recommendation has appeared to all of us. Actually, I got to know the Techmoan channel for a recommendation that appeared on the 8-bit Guy channel and then I got to know the Technology Connections channel for the recommended videos while watching Techmoan. And these three have been the only channels that I subscribed to immediately after watching a single video.
That Outro sketch was brilliant! I'm 21 and this crt whine sound in the sketch was extremely uncomfortable to me even through my smartphone's crappy speakers. Usually I watch videos on my PC with headphones and have to turn the volume way down when there's a CRT in it. How I could bear to watch TV or play NES games on my parent's CRT screen when I was a little kid is beyond me. Well, seems you do get used to it, when there's no alternative, but boy am I glad the days of CRT screens are over!
The only time I felt those high pitch sounds being uncomfortable for me was when I was playing the original Gran Turismo and Oxyacetylene by Cubanate came on. You get to just after two minutes in and my 9 year old ears were really sensitive to the effect they used. Now I am nearly 30 and I have no issues at all. If you want to listen to the song, it is on RUclips.
Holy I'm 30 and I can still hear the whine from those CRT monitors even with youtube compression and played over a crappy speaker. When CRT was still being used in my house I could use the whine to tell when the tv was on and on mute from behind the tv. I'm not complaining about how good my hearing still is but now I can't get my ears to stop hearing that tone. I still use a CRT monitor when I decide to play retro games but I don't know why today my ears reacted like this. Actually there is another RUclips channel that I watch fairly where a few videos use that high of a frequency to announce another presence and those videos I really have to tone down the volume.
This is hilarious, you seriously don't get you are the exact person this sketch is poking fun at. "Hey everyone I'm sooo sensitive. Pleeease someone acknowledge that I have sensitive hearing." But no one cares because they can see you're just blowing it out of proportion to try and get attention. Wow you must have sensitive hearing. You're amazing. Are you satisfied now?
Weird, I am sensitive to HF whine and even through my headphones I couldn't hear any whine in the audio here. I tested them with some 16-20 kHz tones (aaaaargh!) and they're fine.
Plasma display, lovely. Reminds me of the Neve VR mixing desk meter bridge, peak & VU for each channel. The meter bridge had its own rack mount power supply! Power hungry bit of kit.
I can still hear sound at 15kHz. I imagine the days are numbered for me and that frequency, but it has fortunately helped me catch and filter it while editing audio before an upload. I wouldn't have considered it except I saw younger guys complaining about it on other content creator's videos before I started producing videos with CRTs, so... filtered it is. Great skit, Techmoan! Oh - The VU part of the vid was great, too!
I'm 32 and I can still hear the CRT sound. I recently got a CRT running in my house, and my cat who is far younger than the widespread use of flat panels is terrified of the sound it makes.
I have two Dorrough 40-A meters in my little audio rack. Really helps get everything to an ideal level on the mixer. After calibrating them according to how Dorrough recommends, I can trust the audio signals.
That RTW peakmeter brings back good memories. We had one in our radiostudio, sadly during economical problems we had to close the studio after 50 years and sell the parts. Should have bought that peakmeter..
you can also slide the black button on the front with RTW written on it all the way to the left and change the scale :) RTW ftw, best meters on the market imho, keep it!
I've designed broadcast equipment using VFDs. Firstly that one is probably a special. The manufacturer has taken a standard VFD and put two colour phosphors in for one ccustomer. Secondly as flat panels got better a lot of manufacturers stopped doing bigger VFDs. We had to redesign one product to use LEDs.
Thanks for this video, looking forward to the next one! You said the second Vu-meter has the same width as a cassette tape. I loved this comparison unit, only our generation _immediately_ knows how wide it is and where it can fit. By the way, on a cassette player, the indicators also have the witdh of a tape.
I remember when Radio Shack sold outboard power/VU meters in a little box for cheap. You just hooked them up to your speaker outputs... I can't imagine they were too accurate but they sure were cool to look at those lit up analog displays flying in the breeze.
Just on the RTW meter, I used to sell them and one of the reasons the RTW 1206 was discontinued was because traditional broadcast metering moved from peak metering to loudness metering. Peak metering, as the name suggests, only measures the peaks, loudness metering measures the overall loudness of the production, be it 30s or 2 hours. In layman's terms, it measures the peaks and the troughs (the dynamic range) and averages it out. Your production could not be below a predefined dynamic range average or it would be rejected. So the PPM meter became obsolete pretty quickly. It was used primarily to combat the loudness wars, or the propensity for engineers to over compress their productions in order to make them sound louder. A responsible sound engineers could still use it to get a decent average but without a proper loudness meter, you could never be sure what the true dynamic range average was. Those RTW Peak Meters were amazing and I really miss mine.
It's called a FloraScan Display (if I have that spelled correctly) It's also the same display as in our Akai EA-A7 7-band Graphic Equalizer. It's colored florescent paint that is energized by (i believe) grounding the proper painted surface to cause the paint to Flores. The neat thing about a FloraScan Display is that the manufacturer can design any kind of icon to be lit up, in any given color, for any given function. They would kind of be the predecessor to OLed but required some sort of gas, like argon to function.
I've just hooked up my Sony SEQ-D705, taken from a MIDI stack i grabbed form Marketplace for £30, to my DENON AVR-1803. Nice to add some visual bling, love this video. Fab as ever, thanks for reading :)
I've really been craving visual elements for my music like this. Over the last year or so I've been reminiscing of the days of when software like winamp had 100s of visualization plugins from dancers to starscapes and matrix code. It's crazy to me that most of that sorta thing seems to have all but dried up considering how prolific it seemed and considering most people's music player is also a device with a screen.
The high pitched whines from CRTs drove me absolutely insane for so many years. For a long time I actually wore earplugs whenever I was in a computer lab or near a particularly loud CRT. When flat screens came along, I couldn't switch over fast enough. I forgot these things though. I recently bought a Commodore monitor and instantly discovered that there was absolutely no way I could use it for long. If I want to use the C64 without earplugs I'm going to need to plug it into a modern TV.
(16:55) About 20 years ago, I could walk down the street and I could tell which houses were watching television even though you couldn't hear the audio outside, just from that high pitched signal. I can't hear it these days, and I take good care of my ears.
Your obsessing with VU meters and spectrum analyzers is like mine with the same kind of android apps. I have a bunch of spectrum analyzer apps on my phone that work by using the mic. It's fun to see them work. 😃
All my life CRT whine drove me nuts. I could walk in to a room and immediately know someone was watching TV. Not having heard it for years now, we recently stayed in a rental with one and it was unbearable! LOL very relatable skit!
I'd be interested to see if there were any other elements on the VFD tube hidden from view by the case cover... They could have made that tube with red and orange phosphors if it were purpose built instead of using a colored lens, so it makes me think that the display may have been adapted for this particular product.
That second one would be the perfect size for having it on the desk by a computer, rather than on a hi-fi. The combined USB and 3.5mm jack cable also seems to support the idea of plugging it directly into a computer's I/O panel. I'm guessing that is the intended niche.
If you are interested in the display used in the RTW, just look up IN-33 or PBG12201 (these are basically the same, one is a Russian made the other one was manufactured by Burroughs). It is actually a bar graph display, but quite different from the IN-13 you've mentioned, it is more complex to drive. Burroughs called it a "Self scan" bar graph display. According to an app-note I've found they also had circular ones available, although I've never seen any of that before.
The 1206 was installed in every control room I worked in (started 1982), until being phased out when EBU R-128 became the standard. As shown in the video (discontinued), a range of dB scales are shown. They mirror the absolute chaos that ruled audio level standards across nations an even facilities. The BBC even had their own weird ppm standard. R-128 is a loudness meter based on rather complex math, but really easy to use. Older ppm was based on a defined electrical value, while the new standard is a calculation for loudness and true-peak. The latter takes into consideration the overshoot in a D/A stage. Just scratching the surface here, lots of info around. 😅👍
Spot the Zoolander reference! Sadly the noise from CRTs has long since faded from my hearing range, but there is good news still! It has been replaced by tinnitus of pretty much the exact same frequency. 😀
strangely enough for me, i still work with a crt turned on next to me pretty much 10-12h every days and i dont hear the coil whine, but when i watch a video with a crt within the vicinity of the microphone i feel like a bat in an echo chamber. i guess it might be down to the audio normalization or compressor that brings it up at more audible level. anyway whenever i watch retro stuff on youtube i just wack on the high filter on my yamaha amp and forget about it.
I created a 15625Khz tone in Audacity to check if I could still hear at nearly 35 and yeah that high pitch is still there. Even when I can't hear it anymore the i'll still remember the sound that you just tuned out when every display was a CRT. I don't know why people complain every time they encounter a CRT.
Some people really overreact with the high pitched whine noise of the crt TVs. I’m currently watching this video on a old crt monitor. I don’t even hear these noises anymore and I’m 17.
fairly sure the RTW display is a plasma discharge type display. Studer and ward beck use them in their audio sound board consoles, and they are not cheap!
We had the same VU meter from RTW in both studios I worked in in the 90s, great products. Also, the topic of the muppet sketch... Lost my high frequency response myself, so it’s the same scenario every time I set up the monitors for gaming at work. Complains, complains and whining from the young whipper snappers... forcing me to use flatscreens instead. 😂
I lost my high frequency response a bit later, and more dramatically, than most. Every now and then, if I've had too much coffee and the stars are in perfect alignment, I can just make out the hum of a CRT...or perhaps I've just been imagining it.
It is a horrible sound though. I'm sure some CRT's have it worse than others, since I don't remember it ever being an issue on the living room TV we used to have, or my old CRT computer monitor. But these days some CRT's really are unbearable. Maybe back when CRT's were normal I had a tolerance built up, and now that I don't have to deal with it all the time, it really stands out as being painful when I am around one. Now that I am thinking of CRT screens, kids these days wont have had the experience of touching the glass on the TV screen to feel the static build up xD I guess the bonus is parents not having to clean the smears off modern TV's all the time :p
I never noticed a whine on CRTs through the 90s and 00s. The only thing that bothered me about them was when the refresh rate was set too low which made me nauseous. Loved hitting that degauss button. But I loved getting my first LCD in 2006 to bring to LAN parties more! I'm still using that as my secondary monitor right now.
"so i typed it in and it leads to a website thats in chinese, that apears to be using as many stock photos as is possible to fit on one page" actual lol from that one dude, thanx for that! great videos. glad youve been making them
I'd love to see a repair vid on the craptacular VU meter :) Also I'd LOVE to see a more in depth look at the internals of the RTW meter. I see some DAC chips in there, an EEPROM, and what look like display drivers. I'm intrigued!
If you like the RTW 1206, have a look at the RTW 1227E, this is a bigger version with some more functions. It is still in use in many broadcasting facilities here in the Netherlands.
![Get VU meters in your system and in your life [Fosi Audio LC30]](/img/1.gif)
I love how RTW got back to you so fast, and with the correct info.
I'm pretty sure there's a German stereotype here somewhere. . .
@@DasGanon Yes, they've always been very good at numbering things and people to track them and record their movement, status, disposal, etc.
@@StarkRG lol
How did you write this comment 4 days ago if it says published on the 1st of may. Are you Dr Strange?
How can your reply be from 4 days back while the video was posted 7 hours ago ?
it is a neon plasma display. old pinball machine use te same type of displays with orange dot pixels.
and they use +100 V/ -100V DC to make them work, so it takes a very special power supply that most consumer stuff isn't going to have.
The Japanese electronics industry went all-in on Plasma technology in the 1990's, with lots of government funded R&D. LCD displays then got cheap and ate their lunch.
The information displays in Japanese train stations and airports used to use similar displays. They must have been expensive but could display very bright and sharp text compared to LED and flipdot signs.
Exactly. It's more spesifically a self-scanning neon bargraph!
No wonder those pinball machines had a very different and distinctive brightness and color in their displays.
A boost converter that converts 12V to +/- 100V costs under $1 I think.
Every Radio Sweden control room/studio I've worked in, had those RTW meters. It was certainly the most important item in the whole room; no audio engineer would ever risk being too loud in national radio! I just love watching them!
How about the Danish NTP meters. That was what I started out using 1981.
I always claimed it to be a must to have somewhere in your angle of view since it so clearly alerted me for playing to loud.
Yes, RTW 1206 meters are professional (and extremely sturdy) gear. I've used them for years in edit suites, broadcast vans, etc. Hold on to it. It's worth every penny.
If only I could find one somewhere. I wonder how many years one of them would last? They certainly look like they are built to last.
@@jamescollins6085 They last almost forever. In 30 years I've never seen one break down, let me put it like that. Where to find one? Apart from the obvious Ebay, try local radio studios and things like that. They may have changed to computer/DAW based meters...
my rtw 1206 has been part of my studio for around 25years and still faultless, useful and relevant to this day :) amazed to see you feature one tbh matt, great stuff :)
Another cracking puppet sketch. (Also, good call on the video length and keeping the other displays for future videos.)
Very nice touch of RTW to reply, not just at all, but with such celerity.
Also excellent use of the word celerity.
We all did get used to the CRT whine but it was still noticeable to an extent. I remember when I'd been out for the day/night I could hear/sense the crt whine coming from a distant TV as soon as I opened the front door, even if you couldn't hear the sound of the TV show being watched. Thinking about it I got some level of comfort from it, you knew your Mum or loved one was home and was up waiting for you to return. You knew someone was home without a word being spoken.
related to the end of the video:
I love CRT whine. When I was younger, I could always tell when someone turned on a tv anywhere in the house. It also gave me the ability to predict when it was going to be a "movie day" at school because I could hear the TV on in the back room... frequently also meant that there would be a substitute teacher that day lol
I'm glad we got to see the puppets, they cheer my day!
And I'm eager to see the rest of the meters also.
"I think my brain can smell the future, and next Thursday is the colour blue".
Best line ever spoken on a RUclips video.
So funny 😆
New Order - Blue Tuesday
I laughed hysterically!
About 20 years ago, I could walk down the street and I could tell which houses were watching television even though you couldn't hear the audio outside, just from that high pitched signal.
My favorite visualizations by far are spectrograms, don't see enough of those at all.
Mine is a vectorscope.
FYI you can tell the approximate vintage of the RTW meter (and most other bits of kit) by the date code on, eg, the chip at the top right at 11:02. '9030' = 30th week of 1990.
davidf2281 - Plus ‘Made in WEST Germany’!
Yankis - True. I recently bought a ‘new old stock’ Cullmann tripod that had a ‘Made in West Germany’ sticker on it.
yeah but what about trabants? ;)
The "Made In West Germany" sticker is a less accurate measurement if they had lots of stickers left over, and German law wasn't altered to make them stop using them.
Good eye! I had forgotten all about date codes.
I have a list of RUclips producers that have never heard of a VU meter and need to watch this STAT.
Was just waiting for you to change the scale on the RTW meter. Press and slide the RTW button, and it will change from DIN PPM to VU scale.
"I think my brain can smell the future, and next Thursday's the color blue" - just confirming I heard that
Yeah, but mr. Moanie got it wrong! Thursday is ruled by Jupiter, and it's associated colour is yellow.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if he deliberately gave wrong information, as it seems he's being controlled by external forces...
In former Czechoslovakia were produced modulometers with moving mirrors (for stereo). It gave them speed to be proper peak meters. Some designer had an idea use them in locomotives as indicators of preset and current speed. When sun shone into cabin you couldn't see anything.
janovlk And what happened when crossing bumpy "points" (English word for the thing that directs train onto a different track as needed
you can make a 45 minutes video about trees and i will watch lol
take care techmoan
As long as they are "Happy Trees"!!!😃😄 (Bob Ross joke)
Even these 15 minutes didn't feel like it.
Some videos I skip in and skip hard, but not Techmoan ones :)
They just don't make trees like they used to.
so true, lol!
I have a tinnitus around 7K to 9KHz. So even after all the CRTs disappear, I can still enjoy the lovely high-pitched noise until the day I die.
I think the CRT whine is around 15-16kHz, so you're not getting the same whine from your tinnitus. The demise of the CRT just means one fewer whine for you to put up with.
Luckily, I'm also deaf above 7K on the other side, so only half of me would be suffering, thanks to the magic of antibiotics.
I grew up with the sound of CRT and VHS recorders after midnight. They are some of the most relaxing sounds I can think of.
My father has a 1206 since the 80s and it's the only piece of eqipment from back there which he is still using in his studio. Now that's quality.
We were making cool Jumbo led level meters for the stereo in our room or in the car when we were 10 yrs old. Of course most normal kids didn't get a new soldering iron for Christmas. But we knew how to build circuits. And in the level meter ended up on a hat with a radio and a phone. As siblings it became a competition to see who could make the coolest hat. Fond memories 😊
I have a RTW similar to this one but with digital AES inputs and I love it. Watching it while listening to music is quite relaxing! Thank you so much for your videos!
My favorite vu meters was the fluorescent meters of Technics RS-M253X and the analog meters in Sony TC-K4 cassette deck. In my teens I was never tired watching them while playing cassettes on those decks.
The tiny metallic Spectrum analyzer clock is perfect to put in a car, to see the time easily but also enjoy the music better.
That's a really excellent point as it would work well in my cars burnt out clock and ironically for this channel, it would work well as a bright date and time for a dashcam, but is the best time to take in a spectrum analyzer while driving? Sounds like a good way to crash to me, lol
@@samcopus1 just Set IT to manual mode and just turn the spectrum analyser mode on when you're parked.
Back in the 90s, when I started my first electronics course I was fascinated with audio circuits and the VU meters was the coolest project to show to other kids in school hahaha. Still have my LM3915 Pcb somewere
I could listen to you all day..... As long as you don't say audacity, iPhone or Amazon that is. I really like your channel.
Great little bit of creative work to show about the high frequencies of the old Electronics. That bit of sound at the very end was really funny to me. But I guess those of us that are a bit older know those sounds well LOL. Thanks!
Funny sketch at the end. I remember that horizontal oscillator whine from the old TV sets. Drove me nuts. Old Dad wondered what I went on about.
Another great puppet sketch!
I could always hear that sound from our old CRTs, I don't miss it, but it also never bothered me much because it was soon drowned out by whatever I was watching.
I was hoping for a meter long meter!!!!
Aw, so close... Should have been "metre-long meter".
I was also hoping for a VU meter that was 39.34 inches in length.
Fat chance. Metric was phased out ahead of Brexit. Fear not though, you can still use feet, inches, yards, shaftments, cubits, paces, ells, digits, palms, or fathoms.
@@brandondegraaf ruclips.net/video/z5-s-4KPtD8/видео.html
What a great video. From the instant you opened the RTW, it was evident that it was a well designed and robust piece of kit. It should last forever.
I'm happy I can still hear the high pitched note from the crt.
My uncle worked at Arena Synchron Studios in West-Berlin and I am pretty sure to remember seeing a 1206 device sitting on top of his mixer when I visited him in the studio in about 1987.
Next time I see him, I'll surely ask him about that.
Anyway thanks for bringing up those memories.
Greetings from Germany, Lars
The high pitched white noise of old crt monitor that brings back my childhood memories......!
In the early 80's, when my Dad was still HEAVILY in to his hi-fi gear, he used to love making amps and would always put a spectrum analyser on to the few amps that he made for himself and I remember sitting next to his gear as he played something like ELO or The Beatles and him always reminded my not to jump around too much to ensure the stylus didn't jump and telling my to look at the lights move to the sound!
The simple aluminium one would be really cool just as a clock!
Wow! I have not seen one of those tube based VU meters (Top right image 0:21) since the early 70's when we had one in an old reel to reel tape deck. Fantastic!
It was nice seeing a little @Technology Connections easter egg at 0:15. Definitely another favorite channel of mine.
Well, that recommendation has appeared to all of us. Actually, I got to know the Techmoan channel for a recommendation that appeared on the 8-bit Guy channel and then I got to know the Technology Connections channel for the recommended videos while watching Techmoan. And these three have been the only channels that I subscribed to immediately after watching a single video.
That Outro sketch was brilliant!
I'm 21 and this crt whine sound in the sketch was extremely uncomfortable to me even through my smartphone's crappy speakers. Usually I watch videos on my PC with headphones and have to turn the volume way down when there's a CRT in it.
How I could bear to watch TV or play NES games on my parent's CRT screen when I was a little kid is beyond me.
Well, seems you do get used to it, when there's no alternative, but boy am I glad the days of CRT screens are over!
The only time I felt those high pitch sounds being uncomfortable for me was when I was playing the original Gran Turismo and Oxyacetylene by Cubanate came on. You get to just after two minutes in and my 9 year old ears were really sensitive to the effect they used. Now I am nearly 30 and I have no issues at all. If you want to listen to the song, it is on RUclips.
What crt whine?
Holy I'm 30 and I can still hear the whine from those CRT monitors even with youtube compression and played over a crappy speaker. When CRT was still being used in my house I could use the whine to tell when the tv was on and on mute from behind the tv. I'm not complaining about how good my hearing still is but now I can't get my ears to stop hearing that tone. I still use a CRT monitor when I decide to play retro games but I don't know why today my ears reacted like this.
Actually there is another RUclips channel that I watch fairly where a few videos use that high of a frequency to announce another presence and those videos I really have to tone down the volume.
This is hilarious, you seriously don't get you are the exact person this sketch is poking fun at. "Hey everyone I'm sooo sensitive. Pleeease someone acknowledge that I have sensitive hearing." But no one cares because they can see you're just blowing it out of proportion to try and get attention.
Wow you must have sensitive hearing. You're amazing.
Are you satisfied now?
Weird, I am sensitive to HF whine and even through my headphones I couldn't hear any whine in the audio here. I tested them with some 16-20 kHz tones (aaaaargh!) and they're fine.
SO glad I stayed to the end for very humorous puppet sketch!
How many people tried to wipe the dust off of their laptop screens when the mini analyzer was first displayed? 😜
guilty
I did hahahaha
Yep
That dust has bothered me so much 😂
I actually went to the kitchen to get a cloth. :-(
That was one of the best puppet sketches I've seen here. And your video, as always, makes me desperately want to go to ebay and look up tech!
Plasma display, lovely. Reminds me of the Neve VR mixing desk meter bridge, peak & VU for each channel. The meter bridge had its own rack mount power supply! Power hungry bit of kit.
Thanks for the countdown. I barely managed to close the browser before the puppets startet. Phew!
I can still hear sound at 15kHz. I imagine the days are numbered for me and that frequency, but it has fortunately helped me catch and filter it while editing audio before an upload. I wouldn't have considered it except I saw younger guys complaining about it on other content creator's videos before I started producing videos with CRTs, so... filtered it is. Great skit, Techmoan! Oh - The VU part of the vid was great, too!
I'm 32 and I can still hear the CRT sound. I recently got a CRT running in my house, and my cat who is far younger than the widespread use of flat panels is terrified of the sound it makes.
I love the title. A perfect demonstration to the Yanks of when to use what spelling.
I have two Dorrough 40-A meters in my little audio rack. Really helps get everything to an ideal level on the mixer. After calibrating them according to how Dorrough recommends, I can trust the audio signals.
Bring on the Next 4! Great video, as always!
That RTW peakmeter brings back good memories. We had one in our radiostudio, sadly during economical problems we had to close the studio after 50 years and sell the parts. Should have bought that peakmeter..
I work as a journalist for a local Belgian newschannel. And we still use the RTW 1206 vu-meter for editing newsreports.
That tiny one has a perfect use case in a car, mounted in the dashboard perhaps, the size is perfect to go alongside a head unit
"Next Thursday is the colour blue." - brilliant!
you can also slide the black button on the front with RTW written on it all the way to the left and change the scale :)
RTW ftw, best meters on the market imho, keep it!
I honestly think he does not know. Otherwise he would have shown it?
ha ha love the outro 'next Thursday is the colour blue' awesome video too, loved how RTW actually got back to you
I've designed broadcast equipment using VFDs. Firstly that one is probably a special. The manufacturer has taken a standard VFD and put two colour phosphors in for one ccustomer. Secondly as flat panels got better a lot of manufacturers stopped doing bigger VFDs. We had to redesign one product to use LEDs.
Thanks for this video, looking forward to the next one!
You said the second Vu-meter has the same width as a cassette tape. I loved this comparison unit, only our generation _immediately_ knows how wide it is and where it can fit. By the way, on a cassette player, the indicators also have the witdh of a tape.
I remember when Radio Shack sold outboard power/VU meters in a little box for cheap. You just hooked them up to your speaker outputs... I can't imagine they were too accurate but they sure were cool to look at those lit up analog displays flying in the breeze.
11:14 that is one of the cleanest and most organized cercuit boards I have ever seen.
could watch this sort of stuff all day...thanks
Just on the RTW meter, I used to sell them and one of the reasons the RTW 1206 was discontinued was because traditional broadcast metering moved from peak metering to loudness metering. Peak metering, as the name suggests, only measures the peaks, loudness metering measures the overall loudness of the production, be it 30s or 2 hours. In layman's terms, it measures the peaks and the troughs (the dynamic range) and averages it out. Your production could not be below a predefined dynamic range average or it would be rejected. So the PPM meter became obsolete pretty quickly. It was used primarily to combat the loudness wars, or the propensity for engineers to over compress their productions in order to make them sound louder. A responsible sound engineers could still use it to get a decent average but without a proper loudness meter, you could never be sure what the true dynamic range average was. Those RTW Peak Meters were amazing and I really miss mine.
looking forward to see the Dorrough Loudness Monitors in the next video.
It's called a FloraScan Display (if I have that spelled correctly) It's also the same display as in our Akai EA-A7 7-band Graphic Equalizer. It's colored florescent paint that is energized by (i believe) grounding the proper painted surface to cause the paint to Flores. The neat thing about a FloraScan Display is that the manufacturer can design any kind of icon to be lit up, in any given color, for any given function. They would kind of be the predecessor to OLed but required some sort of gas, like argon to function.
I've just hooked up my Sony SEQ-D705, taken from a MIDI stack i grabbed form Marketplace for £30, to my DENON AVR-1803. Nice to add some visual bling, love this video. Fab as ever, thanks for reading :)
Nice Sony Trinitron PVM/BVM mr. _Techno man._ They really are great for playing old video games all the way up to the PS2 era.
DJ Kimera's Cloud Up is one of those ubiquitous songs that everyone knows, but doesn't know the name of.
I've really been craving visual elements for my music like this. Over the last year or so I've been reminiscing of the days of when software like winamp had 100s of visualization plugins from dancers to starscapes and matrix code. It's crazy to me that most of that sorta thing seems to have all but dried up considering how prolific it seemed and considering most people's music player is also a device with a screen.
The high pitched whines from CRTs drove me absolutely insane for so many years. For a long time I actually wore earplugs whenever I was in a computer lab or near a particularly loud CRT. When flat screens came along, I couldn't switch over fast enough. I forgot these things though. I recently bought a Commodore monitor and instantly discovered that there was absolutely no way I could use it for long. If I want to use the C64 without earplugs I'm going to need to plug it into a modern TV.
(16:55) About 20 years ago, I could walk down the street and I could tell which houses were watching television even though you couldn't hear the audio outside, just from that high pitched signal. I can't hear it these days, and I take good care of my ears.
Your obsessing with VU meters and spectrum analyzers is like mine with the same kind of android apps. I have a bunch of spectrum analyzer apps on my phone that work by using the mic. It's fun to see them work. 😃
1206 indicator - Looks a lot like one of the small plasma displays we used on some Military aircraft radios in the mid 80s
Someone should make you a 1m long neopixel based VU meter.
Maybe ask Julian, he really likes VU meters. ruclips.net/user/julius256
@@Hagledesperado that channel looks like its going to be fun to explore later! Thanks!
The world needs a VU meter that's 39.34 inches in length!
All my life CRT whine drove me nuts. I could walk in to a room and immediately know someone was watching TV. Not having heard it for years now, we recently stayed in a rental with one and it was unbearable! LOL very relatable skit!
I'd be interested to see if there were any other elements on the VFD tube hidden from view by the case cover... They could have made that tube with red and orange phosphors if it were purpose built instead of using a colored lens, so it makes me think that the display may have been adapted for this particular product.
That second one would be the perfect size for having it on the desk by a computer, rather than on a hi-fi. The combined USB and 3.5mm jack cable also seems to support the idea of plugging it directly into a computer's I/O panel. I'm guessing that is the intended niche.
Hello, it does not matter if the video lasts 50 minutes I love your videos, thank you, and keep going
If you are interested in the display used in the RTW, just look up IN-33 or PBG12201 (these are basically the same, one is a Russian made the other one was manufactured by Burroughs). It is actually a bar graph display, but quite different from the IN-13 you've mentioned, it is more complex to drive. Burroughs called it a "Self scan" bar graph display. According to an app-note I've found they also had circular ones available, although I've never seen any of that before.
The 1206 was installed in every control room I worked in (started 1982), until being phased out when EBU R-128 became the standard. As shown in the video (discontinued), a range of dB scales are shown. They mirror the absolute chaos that ruled audio level standards across nations an even facilities. The BBC even had their own weird ppm standard. R-128 is a loudness meter based on rather complex math, but really easy to use. Older ppm was based on a defined electrical value, while the new standard is a calculation for loudness and true-peak. The latter takes into consideration the overshoot in a D/A stage. Just scratching the surface here, lots of info around. 😅👍
I always check for puppets before watching. I do love those puppets.
Puppets
GOOD NEWS! :D
Your place would be a trip if you hooked up all of your visual analysers, nixie tubes and visualisers.
Sounds like a fire hazard though lol
We'd probably need Big Clive to come run some heavy-duty power cables. LOL
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IT! Keep them coming as I'm looking for a good one of these.
Spot the Zoolander reference!
Sadly the noise from CRTs has long since faded from my hearing range, but there is good news still! It has been replaced by tinnitus of pretty much the exact same frequency. 😀
strangely enough for me, i still work with a crt turned on next to me pretty much 10-12h every days and i dont hear the coil whine, but when i watch a video with a crt within the vicinity of the microphone i feel like a bat in an echo chamber.
i guess it might be down to the audio normalization or compressor that brings it up at more audible level.
anyway whenever i watch retro stuff on youtube i just wack on the high filter on my yamaha amp and forget about it.
I created a 15625Khz tone in Audacity to check if I could still hear at nearly 35 and yeah that high pitch is still there. Even when I can't hear it anymore the i'll still remember the sound that you just tuned out when every display was a CRT. I don't know why people complain every time they encounter a CRT.
Some people really overreact with the high pitched whine noise of the crt TVs. I’m currently watching this video on a old crt monitor. I don’t even hear these noises anymore and I’m 17.
Technik freak PAL or VGA? Horizontal refresh rate is different.
@@johnfrancisdoe1563 its a VGA monitor
Puppet story was awesome again! Thankyou for that.
I (was) having just a normal, ordinary day. It turned to AWESOME, right after "new Techmoan video" alert. Ahhh, thanks mate.
fairly sure the RTW display is a plasma discharge type display.
Studer and ward beck use them in their audio sound board consoles, and they are not cheap!
Love the plasma display on the 1206.
We had the same VU meter from RTW in both studios I worked in in the 90s, great products.
Also, the topic of the muppet sketch... Lost my high frequency response myself, so it’s the same scenario every time I set up the monitors for gaming at work. Complains, complains and whining from the young whipper snappers... forcing me to use flatscreens instead. 😂
I lost my high frequency response a bit later, and more dramatically, than most. Every now and then, if I've had too much coffee and the stars are in perfect alignment, I can just make out the hum of a CRT...or perhaps I've just been imagining it.
It is a horrible sound though. I'm sure some CRT's have it worse than others, since I don't remember it ever being an issue on the living room TV we used to have, or my old CRT computer monitor. But these days some CRT's really are unbearable. Maybe back when CRT's were normal I had a tolerance built up, and now that I don't have to deal with it all the time, it really stands out as being painful when I am around one.
Now that I am thinking of CRT screens, kids these days wont have had the experience of touching the glass on the TV screen to feel the static build up xD
I guess the bonus is parents not having to clean the smears off modern TV's all the time :p
I never noticed a whine on CRTs through the 90s and 00s. The only thing that bothered me about them was when the refresh rate was set too low which made me nauseous. Loved hitting that degauss button. But I loved getting my first LCD in 2006 to bring to LAN parties more! I'm still using that as my secondary monitor right now.
That 2nd one would be neat to have at your computer desk. I always like to have some sort of regular clock on my desk.
Great video from start to finish! I thin that end skit was one of my favorites!
"so i typed it in and it leads to a website thats in chinese, that apears to be using as many stock photos as is possible to fit on one page" actual lol from that one dude, thanx for that! great videos. glad youve been making them
I'd love to see a repair vid on the craptacular VU meter :) Also I'd LOVE to see a more in depth look at the internals of the RTW meter. I see some DAC chips in there, an EEPROM, and what look like display drivers. I'm intrigued!
My Favorite is the Realistic APM-200 I have had mine for decades! Peak and RMS Audio Power Meter
Thanks!! And one of the best skits yet!! I nearly did a spit take with my morning coffee more than once!! Funny as hell!! Thanks again, Techmoan!
I had from them 12 pieces on my old analog Soundcraft console. I sold them, and from the money I bought a huge digital console :)
Looks like a miniature of the giant lighting display from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Yeah! Puppets!!
Love the video. That 2nd one is awesome, but I hope they make a bigger one of it
If you like the RTW 1206, have a look at the RTW 1227E, this is a bigger version with some more functions. It is still in use in many broadcasting facilities here in the Netherlands.
Am I the only one that kinda likes the CRT buzz? It reminds me of when I was younger.