Free is cheaper than cheap, and that was how I acquired the first three Cheap Trick albums, as promo copies from the radio station. Cheap Trick was outside the station’s Adult Contemporary format, that relied heavily on James Taylor, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow.
https://youtu.be/FQDc9loiFuk
In Color and Heaven Tonight are particularly good, and they’re in my latest pile of frequency played albums. Cheap Trick at Budokan escaped my grasp. By then Cheap Trick was a big name act, and I was the Les Nessman of the station, working as a one-man news department. One of the DJ’s must have grabbed it.
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.
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.
