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In Reply to: RE: Stereophile: Computer Audio Without Computers posted by Sprezza Tura on December 12, 2014 at 17:11:20:
I got the Tanberg tape recorder for $200 second hand in 1975. The microphones were about $100 each. To put matters in perspective, my wife gave two recitals in Jordan Hall. The NEC recording department made these recordings of these concerts using the Ampex machine in the Jordan Hall recording booth. (I was familiar with this booth, at least as it was a decade earlier.) I still have the bill for each recording session, about $80 per concert, including tape all spooled onto 7 inch reels with leader tape between pieces.
A bit of history... I used to record/broadcast lectures in Jordan Hall at the "Ford Hall Forum" when I was in college in the 1960s. (One of these was given by Ayn Rand. Quite the bunch of groupies after this event.) I once made a live recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from Sanders Theater. This was just a matter of turning on the equipment and checking it out and pressing PLAY. The levels had already been determined during the rehearsal earlier in the day. (With a 2 dB allowance for the musicians playing louder in front of an audience.). Other recording sessions that my buddies and I did involved Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Malcolm X and Benny Goodman. It was in the course of this work that I learned the difference between live microphone feeds (the reference) and everything else. The college radio station at the time was mono, so FM broadcast was at least decent quality. However, even then the difference between the signal up the cable to the transmitter vs. that back through the monitor was dramatic. Even full track 15 IPS Ampex 350 tape recorders were obviously not transparent to live microphone feeds. In those days we were using KLH 6 speakers for studio monitors.
At WHRB in those days there were two groups, the "techies" who built and maintained the equipment and the "control men" who ran the equipment, recording live concerts and doing broadcasts, live or pre-recorded. I was one of the "control men". We considered many of the techies to be sub human. Our basis for this was their obvious deafness. We were responsible for the quality of the broadcast sound and sometimes the equipment malfunctioned. Our job was to detect this and switch to working gear and then arrange to get the defective gear repaired or replaced by the techies. The usual problem was cartridges and needles used to play LPs. On more than one occasion we would summon a techie and complain that a cartridge was distorting playback. The techie would listen and say, "Sounds OK to me.". This is why we concluded that many of these people were sub human. When we ran into these problems we would solve them by deliberately destroying the defective cartridge, so that even a deaf "techie" could hear that there was a problem.
In these early 1960's days the equipment was mono and tube based. The electronics sounded good. Later after the studios moved, a new bunch of techies designed solid state equipment based on discrete op-amp circuits. Fortunately, I had graduated before this and subsequent sonic debacles. I'm sure that all of this new equipment sounded entirely "OK". That was the problem... I identify today's "objectivists" with the deaf techies from this earlier era. Their attitudes remain, even if their slide rules and pocket protectors are gone.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- A bit of 1970's and 1960's history - Tony Lauck 12/12/1418:39:08 12/12/14 (2)
- RE: A bit of 1970's and 1960's history - Bob_C 22:58:32 12/15/14 (0)
- RE: A bit of 1970's and 1960's history - Sprezza Tura 08:01:20 12/13/14 (0)
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