GDC SR-1000 User Password Hierarchy

[Martin McCaffery]

I have an assistant manager who likes to edit the playlists on my days off and deletes things out of the playlists

You could create his and her playlists at the start. Won't help the scheduling problem, but would at least avoid having to go back and redo them.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Married to the offender is about as problematic as it gets. lol. Should have said so. Even if GDC had the ability to help you there, removing permissions one previously had might invoke personal trust issues. Rock and a hard place.

Maybe have her field all the complaints about the start time discrepancies from now on? To let it crystalize.

[Harold Hallikainen]

This sounds like a 21st century version of what a trade paper in the 1920s called "the picture-racing menace," namely the practice by some projectionists in the late silent era of running the last show of the evening at frame rates of up to 30-35 (hand cranked projectors in those days, so if you had the stamina...) in order to be able to get to the bar before closing time.

Some radio stations would wrap tape around the turntable capstan so records played faster. Supposedly it made other stations sound like they were dragging. Also, the station "played more hits per hour" (and more commercials).

[Marcel Birgelen]

Well, like I said... Don't cause any family friction!!

Feels like a case of insider trading...

Some radio stations would wrap tape around the turntable capstan so records played faster. Supposedly it made other stations sound like they were dragging. Also, the station "played more hits per hour" (and more commercials).

You'd expect those professional turntables having a 78 RPM option. Imagine THE station that made good use of that one: WTFM: Double the highest pitched hits, every hour!

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Feels like a case of insider trading...



You'd expect those professional turntables having a 78 RPM option. Imagine THE station that made good use of that one: WTFM: Double the highest pitched hits, every hour!

Rek-O-Kut (affectionately called Rumble-Kut by most station engineers) all had a 33 and 78 speeds as standard, as did their later slightly more modern replacements. In some radio stations, one of the speeds was tossed in favor of 45 rpm instead of 78. 45 RPM "singles" were popular up into the mid 1970's when tape carts took over.

[Randy Stankey]

Years ago, I used to have an Onkyo turntable with a direct drive, servo controlled mechanism. The platter was cast metal with cadence marks around the outer edge. The strobe had a sensor, connected to the timing circuit that maintained platter speed. It had an adjustment dial on the front control panel for fine tuning the speed and there was a potentiometer under the cover for course adjustment.

It was kind of funny to take the platter off and watch the servo motor spin back and forth, trying to get a lock on the turntable's speed. After about ten seconds, it would shut down and the power light would flash to indicate an error.

I always assumed that radio stations used more professional versions of this type of turntable and adjusted the controls to speed up play. I've seen people put a fat rubber band around the capstan when the rubber roller gets glazed but I never thought about using tape to tinker with the speed.

You'd think that one would have to be careful to wrap the tape so that it spirals in the right direction, though. If you wrapped the tape with the cut edge facing into the direction of travel it might flap loose and get wadded up in the mechanism! That would be bad!

There used to be a radio station, WMDI, that we listened to when we could get it to tune in. It was kind of a "stoner" station. The DJs were always high. They would frequently play entire album sides then go outside to smoke up. You'd often hear five or ten minutes of runout groove before the DJ would come back in, completely out of his gourd, saying, "Um... That was... Um..." as he tried to read the record label while it was still spinning on the turntable.

Listening to WMDI was like a live Cheech and Chong sketch! You often heard bumps, scratches and wows as the guy tried to cue up a record. While I wouldn't expect them to tape the capstan in order to speed up play, I wouldn't be surprised if I hears something like a piece of tape getting wrapped up in the mechanism, live, on-air!

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Randy, that sounds like the Radio Station we built during High School... All donated equipment from various stations around Chicago... We had a ten watt gates transmitter with antenna atop a 75 foot phone pole.

[Randy Stankey]

Yup! Just like that! Their studio was an old mobile home, parked on a cement pad by the side of a dirt road on the edge of a cornfield. You could hear the crickets and frogs in the background of the DJ's announcements, late on a summer night. They produced their own advertisements which often sounded like Cheech and Chong sketches.

They lasted about ten years before their slot was bought out by an easy listening station. Now, it's classic rock.

[Leo Enticknap]

You'd expect those professional turntables having a 78 RPM option.

Many consumer turntables these days have a 78 RPM option, either by varying the motor speed, or moving the belt to a wider groove on the pulleys. The turntable I use for playing and digitally capturing coarsegroove records (Vestax BDT-2500) is infinitely variable between 16 and 95. Because in the acoustic era, cutting speeds were not precisely controlled by any stretch of the imagination, for music recordings I try to find sheet music of the actual piece, and then adjust the playback speed until I hear the key it's supposed to be in.

The big problem with playing coarsegroove records is that many people with small collections inherited from relatives, etc., don't know that if you play them with a stylus pitch suited to microgroove records you will cause serious damage to the surface, and that if you try to play them through a phono preamp that applies the RIAA EQ curve, the surface noise will be amplified and the actual signal will be attenuated. For optimum results, there are a variety of different stylus options (and mono cartridges designed specifically for the task: I use a Shure M78). For acoustic 78s, you (obviously) want to apply no curve at all at the point of initial capture, and for electric era recordings, different labels had their own proprietary ones (the Blumlein curve for EMI, Columbia and Victor had their own, etc. etc.).