sound board for Kennedy-Nixon Debates, 1960

Since I spend nearly every Sunday morning in our church’s sound booth, production equipment is of great interest to me. Ours was installed last year, so it’s pretty up to date with lots of sliders and knobs.

This one above is a complete dinosaur, literally a museum piece. It’s part of the Kennedy-Nixon Debates exhibit in the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston.

The progress since is truly amazing.

My grandfather was the sound technician at his church for many years. When he was working, he allowed no one in the booth, so I never got to see him in action. I remember what the tiny room looked like when I was a child. A huge reel-to-reel tape machine dominated the area. He had stacks of those tapes in little flat white boxes, labeled with each service date.

When the church changed to cassette tapes, the sound booth seemed bare and somehow sad.

(Grandpa also loved film-making. The whir of his 8mm camera is part of the soundtrack of my life. He experimented with stop-motion, especially in the credits. I’ve thought about recreating some of the work I remember, but I’m not sure I have that much patience.)

I worked in a television station’s tape room in the summer of 1992. The job was anything but enjoyable for me. The equipment needed repair and some extreme measures had to be taken at times to make them work. The cart deck was the most problematic.

“Cart” was short for “cartridge”.

The TV station’s production crew put together local commercials and we’d have to dub them from their tape to these cartridges. The cartridges were then placed in order into the cart deck’s conveyor belt, which was shaped like an oval track. If we had to repeat that commercial, we’d have to pull that cartridge and place it into another slot. If/when the cart deck would stick, Tape Operator would have to literally kick the machine to get it started, resulting in some dead air, the most dreaded term in the television lexicon.

We had to download some programs from satellites. One of the receivers was fixed on a specific satellite, the other was programmable. I hated the programmable receiver. It often refused to lock on its intended target, even when we had input the specific coordinates. Each night, we had to download two early-morning programs. One was downloaded from the fixed receiver; the other from the programmable one.

One night, we were unable to download the program for 15 minutes. We only had the one shot, so the early birds had to sit through 15 minutes of the longest commercials the overnight Master Control Operator could run. Otherwise, we’d have had 15 minutes of dead air or 15 minutes of the slide that read “Don’t call Sperry’s TV. Your TV is OK; the network is experiencing difficulties.”

Apparently, none of the station’s higher-ups were watching TV at 4:30 a.m. because we never heard a word of rebuke.

Now I download nearly everything from cyberspace. No more horrible programmable receivers; instead, I just head for WWW Land. No more kicking a cart deck, although Windows Vista and EasyWorship can be finicky. I’ve learned more about codecs in the last year than in 25 previous years of computing.

I LOVE technology!

This is my slide show from JFK Library:

Click on the link in the gallery or go directly to gallery here.

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