Now, by heavy metal, I do not mean Megadeth. I'm talking a sheet-metal chassis filled with vacuum tubes and wires that connect them to resistors and capacitors and all manner of normal-size things that won't fit on a computer chip.
I'm talking an honest-to-God tube-type, hi-fi tuner . . . circa 1960, when FM was mono, not stereo, but you could buy this little box, see? And when stereo did come to town, this "multiplexer" (below) would set you up.
HI. I'm the Mighty Favog, and I'm a geekaholic. Hi, Favog!
Right now, I'm listening to the new/old Voice of Music tuner. No one will mistake it for state of the art. But the sound it produces could be mistaken for a certain Magnavox console, circa 1962. The one that lived in my childhood home.
It sounds quirky, but really warm. It also gets warm, thanks to the vacuum tubes, which fill the studio with a nostalgic aroma.
The old VM also is unforgiving. It hates rock stations that turn the processing up to 11. It really hates them. I can almost hear it saying, "Back in my day. . . ."
BACK IN its day, FM was for "good music." And like a good tuner of its time, the VM loves classical and jazz, enveloping the orchestration in an affectionate hug, then playfully tousling the music's long hair.
Which is a pun you might "get" if you're as old as I . . . and my Voice of Music tuner.
You may be a geek if you get really excited over winning this in an eBay auction.
I am a geek, because the 1960 Voice of Music tuner (with an add-on FM multiplex adapter for that newfangled "stereo" thing) is mine. Mine! Mine! Mine! Because a radio isn't a real radio without vacuum tubes and Conelrad markers at 640 and 1240 on the AM dial.
There's only one purchase that could make me happier.
Dude, I'll PayPal you the $95 grand in a sec . . . just as soon as I take another hit off of my crack pipe.
Thank God for that. The crystal meth is starting to wear off. I'll bet the little bitty Mexicans hanging auto parts in my hackberry tree don't have one of these!
"Who wants a tape-cartridge recorder?" Not enough people, obviously, since I'll bet you've never seen one of these things. This RCA tape-cartridge recorder is a 1959 model, and it's kind of like a cassette deck, only bigger. With better fidelity, too, because it's basically a reel-to-reel machine with the reels in a great big cassette . . . er, cartridge.
It never stood a chance when little cassettes came along in the mid-1960s.
The world is filled with Philistines! Any idiot knows that Beta the RCA tape-cartridge system is better, but noooooooo!
HEY! You can't argue with "four and one-half years of research."
Well, you can, but that just makes you an audiophobe. Philistine.
Omaha started to go "radiophone" crazy as far back as the end of December 1921, when R.B. Howell over at the municipal water-and-gas works fired up his transmitting apparatus, and station WOU became Nebraska's first broadcast voice. A few months later WAAW chimed in from the Omaha Grain Exchange, and then station WOAW just a year later. By April 1923, radio fever was getting the river city a little bit radiophone delirious.
Take Central High School as a case in point.
In 1922, students were agitating for a radiophone receiver to be installed at the school on "Capitol Hill" downtown. By May 1923, Central had opened its own broadcast station -- KFCZ, operating on 360 meters.
Think of it . . . we fancy ourselves today as quick to embrace transformative new technology. We got nothing on the teachers and teenagers of nine decades ago.
Nine decades ago in Omaha, by God, Nebraska. High-school radio . . . in 1923. Every generation, in its youth, thinks the well-worn path it trods is terra incognita. For some reason, I think this phenomenon is worse in the South -- in the late '20s, Louisianians actually thought they were being progressive by implementing free textbooks in public schools. Instead, they were finally catching up to the Yankees.
IN 1977, we thought we were some sort of a first when WBRH signed on with a whole 10 watts of FM power at Baton Rouge High. Not exactly.
And a half-century before, my college alma mater, Louisiana State University, got its first station in 1924, months and months after Omaha Central High. KFGC was Baton Rouge's first radio station; KFCZ was Omaha's fourth --maybe fifth.
For a while, at least, Omaha's high-school station was on a par with everybody else in town -- the suits at the grain exchange and the fraternal bigwigs at Woodmen of the World, WOAW's owner. At least in terms of the oomph behind those "Hertzian waves" that emanated from the KFCZ aerial.
IN 1925, the radio voice of Central High would become KOCH, running with as much as 500 watts by the next year. Back then, that wasn't nothing -- that was on a par with the "big boys" of broadcasting. Well, at least as big as Midwestern broadcasting got in the mid-'20s.
Broadcasts were received 100 miles away and, according to the school paper, The Weekly Register, "students and teachers participated in making our broadcasts equal to the best in the city."
BY THE FALL of 1928, though, KOCH was no more. Back in Washington, D.C., the Federal Radio Commission had decided that high-school radio stations weren't a compelling use for precious frequencies on the now-crowded broadcast band.
I suspect many student broadcasters thought that was complete bushwa. Imagine . . . nonsense emanating from the rarefied ether of our nation's capital.
And I'm gonna show you something. More precisely, I'm going to let you hear something.
First, however, the setup. In three . . . two . . . one. . . .
IT'S IRONIC that, after introducing the 45 almost a decade earlier, RCA Victor had pretty much perfected the 78 rpm record by 1957. As I told you in an earlier post that sadly lacked an audio-visual component apart from a snapshot of an old Elvis record, RCA's "'New Orthophonic' High Fidelity" was all that.
Let's once again say that like my Elvis 78s, this old Jim Reeves record -- after 54 yearsand God knows how many plays -- sounds better than most new vinyl today, what there is of new vinyl today, and better than a lot of CDs being cranked out today. Imagine when it was brand new. . . .
Anyway, I've been telling people how it has been all but lost to history how good 78s could sound, and now I've decided to show you. Enjoy.
AND NOW the technical notes. . . .
|geek|
The videowas shot with a Nikon CoolPix L20 digital camera. Ambient audio was recorded with a Studio Projects C1 condenser microphone, while the audio from the 78 was off the Webcor record changer's phono output. Both the phono out and the mic output were fed into a Soundcraft stereo mixer, then into a professional sound card.
The audio was recorded to a WAV file with Adobe Audition software, then synced to the Nikon video. The audio track was not cleaned up in any way, just normalized to 98 percent modulation.
Take a 1952 Hank Williams 78 rpm record. Place it on a 1955 Webcor record changer. Watch and listen as magic occurs. As you can hear, 78s could sound quite good. As a matter of fact, I have some that sound a lot better than this.
Before I go back to recording more of these old records onto the computer hard drive, though, I'll leave you with this bit of eerie trivia:
THIS RECORD -- "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" -- was the last Hank Williams single released before the country legend died, hitting the stores in November 1952 and debuting on the Billboard country chart at No. 9 on Dec. 20.
Williams died in the back seat of his Cadillac early New Year's morning 1953, somewhere between Bristol, Va., and Oak Hill, W.Va. Three weeks later, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" hit No. 1 on Billboardthe issue of Jan. 24.
Fifty-nine years later, the needle still drops onto the MGM 78. While the platter spins, Hank lives again, because it's always 1952 somewhere.
In many cases, high fidelity spun into 1950s homes, and into popular culture, at 78 rpm. And so did the king of rock 'n' roll.
I've been putting some more of the records of my youth onto the computer hard drive -- bringing my analog musical formation into the digital present, I guess. This is another of those, Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" (above), on a glorious 10-inch shellac platter.
I couldn't tell you how many times I played this record -- this very 78that's four years older than I am -- as a kid. The rough estimate: lots.
IN 1957, "All Shook Up" was magic. As it was when I first got a hold of it around 1964 or 1965. As it is today.
That goes as well for another of my little stash of Elvis on 78 . . . "Too Much." That's it at left, sitting on a 1955 Webcor record changer here at Anachronism "R" Us.
And you know what? After half a century and change, these records still sound pretty much like new. And I have many compact discs that sound a lot worse. A lot worse, because these old 78s sound great.
RCA Victor's "'New Orthophonic' High Fidelity" was, indeed, all that. All that and a pair of blue suede shoes.
I'm itchin' like a bear on a fuzzy tree to play this stuff on the Big Show, I ga-ron-tee.
I am leaving Mississippi in the evening rain These Delta towns wear satin gowns in a high beamed frame Loretta Lynn guides my hands through the radio Where would I be in times like these without the songs Loretta wrote?
When you can't find a friend, you've still got the radio When you can't find a friend, you've still got the radio Radio . . . listen to the radio Radio . . . listen to the radio
Because I'm a geek, here's a look inside a radio station.
In Detroit.
In 1970.
Because I'm a geek, I miss stuff like radio in Detroit in 1970. And because I'm old, I remember radio in 1970 pretty well.
ALSO because I'm a geek, I liked it when television news featured, uh . . . news.
And because I'm a geek, I liked it when you could distinguish, back in 1970, the network news from the network soaps.
AND BECAUSE I'm a really big geek, I like to watch stuff like this on YouTube.
Some people see a guy getting all worked up over an old cassette recorder, and their weirdo alarm goes off. Geek that I am, I'm thinking "Why does this guy have all the fun and not me?"
It's not an old, never-unboxed radio-cassette deck. It's a time capsule from 1970 -- and you get to play with it because it was built much better than anything you'll find in 2011.
Now, if it could pull in radio stations from 1970, you really might have something there.
The first part of the audio is from the crappy microphone on my Nikon digital camera. Then I fade into the WAV file being recorded of the Les Brown LP on the studio computer. The audio file has been synched to the video.
This is what it really sounds like, folks. I did absolutely nothing to the audio other than adjust the volume.
Compact discs, my foot.
Now sit back, relax and enjoy your visit to the world of 1950s high fidelity. Up next, Les Brown and His Band of Renown with "Meanwhile, Back on the Bus" off of the Capitol Records album "Les Brown's in Town."
And note, please, that hipsters today are paying $28 for 180-gram LPs that fall far short sonically of what was the $2.98 norm in the 1950s and '60s.
This early-1970s TV commercial shows some Magnavox iPods docked for your home listening enjoyment.
Very stylish, no?
And this is a 1970 Magnavox Micromatic iPod undocked and ready to take with you wherever you go.
Young people back in my day were much stronger than today's youth, now more accustomed to toting around today's wimpy little iPod models. Any questions?
Looking at this issue of Broadcasting-Telecasting from way back in 1954, we can see that RCA Chairman David Sarnoff was prophetic as he told the gathered press about the 20-year atomic batteries now powering all our portable electronic devices. About the clean, safe atomic batteries now powering our homes for years upon years -- absolutely free -- for just the low, low cost of the initial purchase.
Never again would the American homeowner have to suffer through a power outage. Never again would consumption or economic limitations be placed upon the American consumer.
Nineteen fifty-four. It was the beginning of not only Atoms for Peace, but also Atoms for Prosperity.
Honey! Hand me the ray gun, will you? No, the garden spider is trying to eat the dog again -- it's already crushed the doghouse trying to get at Rover.
ZAAAAAAAAAAP!
By the way, dear, that dress you're wearing really does something for your tumors. Yeah, the backlight effect on the fabric is really cool.
Click on photo for higher resolution
A few months later WAAW chimed in from the Omaha Grain Exchange, and then station WOAW just a year later. By April 1923, radio fever was getting the river city a little bit radiophone delirious.
In 1922, students were agitating for a radiophone receiver to be installed at the school on "Capitol Hill" downtown. By May 1923, Central had opened its own broadcast station -- KFCZ, operating on 360 meters.
As you can hear, 78s could sound quite good. As a matter of fact, I have some that sound a lot better than this.
I've been putting some more of the records of my youth onto the computer hard drive -- bringing my analog musical formation into the digital present, I guess. This is another of those, Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" (above), on a glorious 10-inch shellac platter.
The first part of the audio is from the crappy microphone on my Nikon digital camera. Then I fade into the WAV file being recorded of the Les Brown LP on the studio computer. The audio file has been synched to the video.
"This" is a 1955 Webcor component record changer. Back then, this would have been part of your expensive and cutting-edge "hi-fi system."
Broadcasting-Telecasting, Feb. 1, 1954, Page 70
