Category: Tech

I Hear the Sound

Driving home from getting my teeth cleaned, I played “The Best of the Five Americans” CD. “I See the Light”, released New Year’s Day ’66, hit me as if I was hearing it for the first time. What a perfect Garage Band sound!

The Five Americans are best known for their #5 hit “Western Union”, released more than a year later. It’s likewise very creative in its construction and production. Music Mike has the single cued up.

Western Union ended its telegram service, but how to update the song’s lyrics? E-mail? Not anymore. Texting? Nope. She’d simply ghost him!

Speaking of advancing technology, cassette decks are long gone from cars, and I should be prepared for my next car not having a CD player. I’ve read there’s even been talk among auto makers that Bluetooth may become the only radio receiver they will offer. No AM or FM, no CD, no Aux jack? Just Bluetooth, for use with Android Auto and Apple Car Play.

The SiriusXM app on my phone, played in the car over Bluetooth, is better than the car’s built-in XM receiver. The app can be set to maximum sound quality, and it doesn’t suffer from reception drop-outs when going under bridges or driving along wooded areas. I’m going to assume that SiriusXM has already decided they won’t go to the trouble and expense of replacing their satellites.

This is the complete Five Americans collection, compliments of Bob Irwin at Sundazed Records. Bob and Gina are on Big Planet Noise tonight at 9 ET. See my Links selection section.

Time-Tested Tables and Tonearms

Micro-Trak Corporation, Holyoke, MA

Telling the tale from my radio days about the transmitter fuse made me nostalgic and got me searching for information about the turntables I loved using. Especially for slip-cueing* singles!

The two tables we had in the DJ studio at the station were 3-speed Russco Cue-Masters. They were manufactured in California and available as late as 1981 — with 78 rpm! — only a couple of years before Compact Disc appeared in the U.S.

Russco Cue-Master broadcast turntable

As you can see, no assumption was made regarding the choice of tonearm. I was working just west of Simpsons City, aka Springfield. Micro-Trak, a company located just north of Springfield, manufactured tonearms. The legendary model 303 had a wooden wand. Yes, wood!

Micro-Trak 303 and 306 tonearms

Micro-Trak sourced its turntables from Russco, and offered them as complete packages with their tonearms factory installed. We had the 720 model — a Russco Cue-Master “Drilled for Micro-Trak Model 303.”

Micro-Trak 720 and 740 turntable packages

The Stanton 500 was a broadcast standard phono cartridge. The 500-E with elliptical stylus was well-suited for stereo records played on FM stations. The 500-E was one of the first cartridges I ever owned, while in high school. At the AM station, the 500-AL with conical stylus was installed in the 303 tonearms, and wired for mono use.**

Stanton 500 Series phono cartridge

This setup was an absolute sure-footed — or armed — delight to use! I have indelible memories of exactly how it felt and sounded handling those turntables and cueing up records. The clutch for changing speeds took some effort to move! That little notch seen in the picture above between the 33 and 45 speeds was where you could park the lever to disengage the drive so the platter would spin freely for swapping records.*** For all the love club DJ’s have for the direct-drive Technics SL-1200, they would be amazed by the tank-like build quality and mechanical strength of those old, idler/rim-drive professional turntables.

The radio biz is nothing like it was, of course. I am very glad that I was able to experience radio broadcasting as it was, when I did. Especially considering the opportunity came from an unsolicited offer that was dropped in my lap.

Continue reading Time-Tested Tables and Tonearms

Daddy’s Still Got a Squeezebox

Good, old Logitech Media Server, aka Squeezebox. The SiriusXM and Amazon Music apps are long gone, and I still haven’t figured out if AAC-to-MP3 transcoding can be made to work for live streaming stations.* Nevertheless, after 12 years, LMS continues to be my most useful digital music source, between having a Logitech Squeezebox Touch, two Squeezebox Radios, and the Squeezeplay PC software.

Logitech stopped making the hardware ten years ago, but they keep mysqueezebox.com running, and occasionally the official release version of the server software gets updated. Something I appreciate with Squeezeplay is how quickly I can jump between stations, as I demonstrate here in one of my TuneIn categories.

An insignificant quirk is that with stations showing information for individual songs, the menu matches what’s being played only when first loaded.

*Examples of stations using AAC are Luxuriamusic and Boss Radio 66. This is the same TuneIn menu seen in the video, as presented on my Onkyo receiver, which supports AAC.

Bend It, Shape It (Stream-of-Consciousness Blog Post)

This is something I started working on six months ago, following an e-mail exchange with good, ol’ Denro. Something that’s an inescapable interest for us, as well as the re-issue professionals we have contact with — Steve Hoffman, Bob Irwin, Andrew Sandoval, and Steve Stanley — is 1960’s record production (with Hoffman going further afield, in both directions).

After the introduction of tape recorders (thank you, Nazi Germany) made overdubs and editing possible, recording studios evolved into becoming instruments themselves. It became more likely that the difference between a hit and a flop could be determined not only by who performed the song, but how the record was produced and engineered.

Here’s an example. “Bend Me, Shape Me” by the American Breed debuted on December 2, 1967, and in early ’68 it became a top 5 hit. But that wasn’t the first time someone had taken a bash at the tune.

There was a very Psychedelic version by an obscure girl group, as produced by Tom Wilson, whose many credits included Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel.

The Outsiders, whose “Time Won’t Let Me” in ’66 was also a #5 hit, put “Bend Me, Shape Me” on their third album.

Within a couple of tom-tom beats, I recognize American Breed’s hit record. I would characterize the sound as nudging its way into Bubblegum Land.

Music Mike provides some background on the single vs. the album version of the song.

Music Mike has one of those classic Top 40 DJ deliveries that I have always admired, but wasn’t able to master myself during my stint at an AM radio mic. So let’s give a listen to Mike talking-up one of my all-time favorite singles.

Here’s Music Mike’s online station: https://www.kvkvi.com/

Tech sidebar: Curiously, Music Mike’s site behaves the way mine used to do here. By default it’s presented to the Net as unencrypted HTTP, but if you specify HTTPS the encryption works. Which is good, except his pop-up player isn’t working with HTTPS, only HTTP. I checked TuneIn, and because it sees HTTP for the stream it won’t play the station through most browsers. This isn’t the sort of technical trouble that FCC-licensed radio station engineers used to handle.

Continue reading Bend It, Shape It (Stream-of-Consciousness Blog Post)

The Great DECline

One of the few remaining vestiges of the once-mighty Digital Equipment Corporation is about to fall.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/30/intel_dec_massachusetts_demolished/

In 1986, Fortune magazine named DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen as America’s most successful entrepreneur.

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1986/10/27/68216/

It would have been laughable in 1986 to suggest that within five years Olsen would be forced out of the company he began in 1957, but that was exactly what happened. By 1996 the end of DEC, the former Massachusetts economic powerhouse, was in sight, after 40 years in business.

https://digital.com/digital-equipment-corporation/

In 1991 there was a recession that hit Massachusetts particularly hard. Every Massachusetts minicomputer company quickly declined, as the PC revolution took over. DEC, along with Data General, Prime, Wang, and Apollo all disappeared, but the Internet revolution came in just as quickly in 1995, and the economy turned around.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6777978

Operating a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer required women to wear a miniskirt. The user manual said so.

P.S. Allison Acoustics was another Massachusetts business that went under during the recession that began in ’91, when Roy Allison’s bank pulled his line of credit.