Radio history - VCR based automation system

[Studio1]

I'm just thinking back to an automation system that we took delivery of in the early 90s. (1992?)

This thing came with two rack cabinets, around 30 Hi-Fi Sharp VCRs (give or take a few), a control box and a 386 computer running some sort of DOS based program. I am sure it came from either the US or Canada.

Audio was to be recorded on to the VHS cassettes and the software would control the operation of the various VCRs via cables connected to the control box.
I remember we had weeks of head-scratching and hair-pulling trying to get it to work. I also remember the agent being flown in from overseas to try to make it work, and I don't think he had much success either.

I left the company before it got sorted so I don't know if it ever really worked, and I sure can't remember what the brand of it was. Any guesses?

 

[RadioMan203]

It almost sounds like it would be doomed from the start! If you consider that VCRs use helical scan you would have that spinning head adding additional wear to the tape when compared to traditional audio tape formats. Compounding this would be the fact that most of the VCRs I've ever run across need a video sync pulse (if not a full blown compliant video signal) to keep the transport on speed to prevent it from wandering. Add to this how do you even cue these things up?

Sounds like more of a nightmare than using open reels.

 

[Tom Wells]

I watched an open-reel 25hz triggered automation system at WFYR in the mid 70s that they had working perfectly.

 

[Fieldtech1]

I know of at least one station in Texas that was using VHS to voice track overnights up till a few years ago. They only had some of their spots for playout via a PC everything else was still on CDs.

 

[PirateJohnny]

I remember hearing about VCR use back then, but for live DJs. I think I remember reading an article extolling the pluses of the higher audio quality as well as a video track that could display the artist's bio and other fun facts that the DJ could read while the track was playing.

 

[jammerdave]

I installed a system in the early 90's at KXOA-AM in Sacto. It was the Systemation X7D "brain", and worked in conjunction with a PC that was used only for spot/ID, etc playout. The X7D portion used a cheapo Commodore computer as sort of a dumb terminal to control & program it. The music was stored on 6 Sony 8mm video decks. These particular decks had the ability to do 6 digital stereo PCM audio tracks. Tapes required a long formatting process, and the 6th track was used only for "cue points" so the system could locate a particular song. All in all, it worked very well.

dave

I'm just thinking back to an automation system that we took delivery of in the early 90s. (1992?)

This thing came with two rack cabinets, around 30 Hi-Fi Sharp VCRs (give or take a few), a control box and a 386 computer running some sort of DOS based program. I am sure it came from either the US or Canada.

Audio was to be recorded on to the VHS cassettes and the software would control the operation of the various VCRs via cables connected to the control box.
I remember we had weeks of head-scratching and hair-pulling trying to get it to work. I also remember the agent being flown in from overseas to try to make it work, and I don't think he had much success either.

I left the company before it got sorted so I don't know if it ever really worked, and I sure can't remember what the brand of it was. Any guesses?

 

[Kmagrill]

We had a crude version of the VCR playback system at an AM station in the early '90s. The audio from the hi-fi VCRs was very impressive. It was CD quality analog audio due to the fact that it was encoded using the same helical scanning technique as the video. As I recall, it was 20Hz to 20kHz and around -90dB SNR. However, the VCRs had to be aligned perfectly and it was a bad idea to mix brands because the alignment was never quite right between them. If the alignment got off, the audio would develop a severe tearing sound from the tracking error. The brain for the system was some sort of early PC (maybe a Vic20 or C64) that had been used for some sort of cassette based automation system in the '80s and was briefly recycled to be used in this updated version. Despite the limitations, it did work, and the audio reproduction was excellent when the system was properly setup.

 

[WNTIRadio]

When I started in radio, I did 7pm-1am. Recorded 7-12mid on the HIFI-VHS. Stopped it at midnight and recorded and cued it up to 7pm. At 1, I hit play and off it went, a repeat of my whole show until the morning guy came in at 6.

What we could have done with voice tracking technology...

 

[OKCRadioGuy]

We used VHS for airchecking our controversial morning show back in the day. We simply set the thing to record the composite input. The video portion of it shot a ESE clock on the back wall behind the rack. It worked great.

 

[WPHA]

I remember the early days (early 90's) of satellite-delivery of the talk programming carried on my former employer, WFIF. I remember being frustrated with their timing being off on the weekend pre-feeds of programs! The station was (and still does) air mostly half-hour Bible teaching and talk programming, so the tops and bottoms of every hour were busy times for the airstaff! Thus, I wanted to try to catch some of those pre-feeds.

To make catching those network program feeds even easier, I was using a Commodore 128d computer, controlling two cassette decks, connected to two Avcom analog receivers. (A very rudimentary automation system that I built & programmed myself. It saved my own butt a few times, catching those daily network feeds each 1/2 hour!) The computer's internal clock was based on the 60Hz line freq, so it was pretty accurate!

What I found out, was that one of the engineers at the network rigged-up a bunch of VCR's to play back those feeds on weekends, so the network could run mostly unstaffed. The person I spoke to on the phone suggested that I avoid trying to use those prefeeds with my timed system. Not exactly the answer I wanted to hear... but it DID explain the timing discrepancies!

Things did get SLIGHTLY better, as I'm sure I wasn't the ONLY guy complaining! Once WFIF got a REAL automation system in 1997 (AudioVault) and the satellite network ditched their kludge, everything improved!

 

[littlejohn]

Who >was< the guy with Systemation? At one point, he was flogging it with high line cassette decks to store and replay audio. Glen Clark was at one point travelling with him showing the first Audio Prisms. Wish I could remember the guy's name- kind of a snake oil salesman approach he had. We looked at it, didn't think cassettes were a good on-air medium and shined it on. Added the Prisms though- which was a Good Move.

 

[BobOnTheJob]

Who >was< the guy with Systemation? At one point, he was flogging it with high line cassette decks to store and replay audio. Glen Clark was at one point travelling with him showing the first Audio Prisms. Wish I could remember the guy's name- kind of a snake oil salesman approach he had. We looked at it, didn't think cassettes were a good on-air medium and shined it on. Added the Prisms though- which was a Good Move.

He may have been involved with WDZ Decatur,IL in the late 80's. While I didn't install it, I did see one of his cassette deck systems in operation in Indiana...it worked, but as you could imagine, keeping cassette decks in phase for mono listening was an exercise in futility. And a couple of spare cassette decks on standby were a must as well.

 

[317C50KW]

Steve Bellinger IIRC.

 

[littlejohn]

I think yer right. And the Il town was a bell ringer. What ever came of him, reckon? He was using Grundig decks, which were probably the cream of what you could get at the time. ITC showed - but never built or marketed - a gorgeous cassette line. The thing probably would have been reliable with those. But you'd never overcome the noise penalty of the tape format, and moving tape was becoming obsolete at that point anyhow.

 

[Kmagrill]

Who >was< the guy with Systemation?

I don't recall the man's name, but he tried selling a system to our AM/FM combo in the Rio Grande Valley. The 19 or 20 year old engineer of that station wasn't comfortable with cassette decks as a source and called me for my input as the group's DE. After reviewing the technical specs and general issues of trying to use cassette decks as program sources, I agreed with our local engineer. I knew he was young and kinda green, but he was going a great job and I trusted his judgment. It also seemed to both of us that CDs were the medium of choice and that cassettes were quickly becoming obsolete. They had also never been considered an acceptable program source, even in their heyday, so I was surprised to hear of a system based on cassettes. When the station manager told the Systemation guy that we were going to pass, based on the concerns of the engineering department, the Systemation reply was to badmouth the engineer, calling him incompetent, an idiot, and so on. The manager told me later that he was still considering the purchase when he placed the final call to Systemation, but their attack on his engineer made him immediately drop them from consideration. Aside from the fact that they were sullying a good employee's reputation, he also realized that if the system failed to work or if there were any support issues it would be nightmarish to work with these people. So, a bad attitude ultimately resulted in a "No-Sale". The young engineer is now, 25 years later, a highly placed engineering executive with a major USA broadcaster. Systemation didn't last nearly as well as the guy they tried to get fired. He who laughs last............

 

[special ed]

I saw the debris from one of those cassette versions. This one had a bunch of Teac decks, and it all was controlled by a Commodore 64. That was long gone, but the Teacs were all over the place, one even ended up as a temporary program amp for a very sick McMartin console. The remaining staff who worked with it just said it was a nightmare. One mistake adding a spot to a tape could ruin dozens of spots and mean hours putting it all back together.

When I got there it had been replaced by a Systemation Hard disk system, that ran commercials and liners only with an Antex ISA audio card. It was remarkably good and easy to run a sat network, but not flexible beyond that.

 

[kberlen]

I worked at an AM station back in the mid 1980's that had one of the Systemation cassette based systems. What a miserable automation! We would develop trouble with a deck, and Teac would not repair them because they had been modified, and Systemation would not work on one other than to repair their add-on board. Of course, Systemation was all too happy to sell us a new deck in this situation. We found a old Audi-Cord (SMC) cart carousel system that had been retired by a station across town. We were with an early satellite network, so we only used the cart carousels, not the old reel-to-reel decks. It worked great and we busted up the Systemation system and thew it in the dumpster.

 

[jesseg]

a video track that could display the artist's bio and other fun facts that the DJ could read

This MUST have been before the 90s rave era.

CD quality analog audio

Thanks, needed a good laugh.

it was encoded using [..] helical scanning

Was it mono, or duplex via digital delay?

 

[Kmagrill]

CD quality analog audio

Thanks, needed a good laugh.

I don't know why "CD quality analog audio" should be funny, per se. It happens to be true.

I have a lot of respect for the JVC engineers that designed the HiFi VCR audio system. It's quite brilliant, actually. AFM was designed after the CD player was introduced, so their goal was to meet or exceed CD specs so that the VCR would sound excellent (and comparable to the CD) when played through the home Hi-Fi system. Even the basic consumer AFM VCRs were near CD quality with 20 to 20kHz audio and a 90dB dynamic range. Stereo cross talk was better than 70dB. It's basically wide-band, low frequency FM carriers encoded on the magnetic medium. The helical scanned FM audio has over 1 mHz of bandwidth to work with, so it's easy to get very high resolution out of the audio. You might check out the Wiki on VHS and AFM before laughing too loud:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system

AFM works outstandingly well when the deck is of good quality. Certainly, it rivals the CD. On ultra cheapie consumer decks, head chatter could be a problem, though. Also, the big Achilles heal was that, especially on consumer decks, recordings made on one deck exhibited chatter on another. This was not a huge problem on pro decks, but was common in the consumer arena.

I still have a 20 year old Panasonic professional grade VCR with balanced audio. In Hi-Fi mode, it has a 20Hz to 21kHz audio passband (+ or - 0.1dB) and has an audio dynamic range of 94dB. I think that's close enough to count as CD quality. It also certainly exceeds the best FM broadcast audio by a fair amount which is why it was, briefly, tried as an automation medium.

 

[ironbear]

20 years ago or so, I saw what I think was a Systemation system that put the main controller in charge of 6-7 Eumig FL-1000up cassette decks (each with its own embedded CPU...hence the 'up'). This worked surprisingly well. The controller was calling out cue points on the cassettes corresponding to VT, music, liner and spot starts. This was made possible by the Eumig's ability to precisely index the cassettes, with excellent repeatability. The Eumig audio was also quite good.