While the mainstay of Eventide has been our 50-year continuous history of making products for music recording and performing, we’ve also made products specifically for broadcasters for almost that long. In fact, Richard Factor got his ‘start’ in radio, designing products for broadcasters years before founding Eventide. So strap in for a deep dive into our broadcast history as Richard recalls his personal history with and within broadcast.
The Broadcast Products that Were and Weren’t
I would guess that a significant percentage of young readers don’t relate to the actual meaning of the term “broadcast.” It is possible that they have grown up listening to what I call internet ‘radio’ ‘stations,’ along with YouTube and other streaming services. Let me assure you, 50 years ago, broadcast meant BROADcast. Your radio and teevee stations were actual stations, no air- or scare-quotes needed. They occupied specific physical locations on the planet and used electromagnetic radiation to send signals in some or all directions. Although such stations still exist, many fewer audience members receive their programs using antennas, preferring instead to get “content,” as we now call it, over the internet.
There Are Implications…
For example, no more CONELRAD! Now, in case of war, the Soviet Bombers* will be able to home in on the transmissions of the remaining stations. CONELRAD was supplanted by EBS in 1963, and radio stations had the sacred duty of monitoring other radio stations to know when the bombers were approaching and to relay an alert. The actual alert never came, but test alerts did, and they had to be logged. So <fiction> radio stations would have to hire a person whose only job was to listen to other stations for these alerts and log them </fiction> or, in the case of actual soviet bombers, open an envelope and confirm that the secret word was part of the alert message and then dive under the radiation-proof broadcast console. Except…Those pesky human beings were as expensive and unpredictable then as they are now. Since they were busy doing other things, alerts often didn’t get logged. Which is a roundabout way to lead into my first broadcast “product,” which both was and wasn’t. I built one and one only, on the station’s dime, while employed as a “broadcast engineer.”
I don’t remember if I ever received payment for the article itself, which now seems risible for its detailed circuit description. But was I ever proud to have my name in a broadcast engineering magazine (prosaically called “Broadcast Engineering”) associated forever with my employer, WABC! At the time, it was the most listened-to station on earth. WooHoo! I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but if Eventide turned 50 about the same time I turned 75, it must mean that I had a “life” even before Eventide. That life, such as it was, pretty much was obsessed with radio, both ham and broadcast.
Another implication: Unlike the ‘radio’ ‘stations’ of today, the stations of yesteryear were regulated by the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, since they used the “public airwaves” instead of private wires and fibers. The FCC, then as now, was run by “commissioners” who were political appointees charged with making sure that broadcasters operated in PICON (which you’ll have to look up since I’ve run out of asterisks for this blog). They did this in several ways. One was mentioned above: preventing destruction of the United States by Soviet bombers. Equally—or perhaps more—important was the protection of listeners from profanity. I’ll get to that and more in Flashback 9.2 but for now…
A Bit of Supplemental History
Eventide remains a work in progress. I found this ten-year-old item on our website, and it explains how we came up with our initial products. It doesn’t say how we didn’t come up with products we didn’t make, and I’d like to mention a couple here, with regrets.
In 1971, there was almost no digital signal processing or computer memory, but there were plenty of disk jockeys—then people who played records on the radio. They all had voices, they all used microphones, and they all sounded different. (At WABC they all sounded really, really good, too.) But did they sound their best? Maybe not! I had the notion to build a voice processor that would equalize frequency response and adjust compression and maybe other characteristics for each individual DJ. How would it work? Each DJ, after some experimentation and with the discernment of the program director, would be given a plastic punch card which would be configured to switch in or out specific components in the processor’s circuit. When the DJ began his air shift, he would insert the card in our notional product. A good idea then, possibly a good idea now. What went wrong? Card readers were unreliable and, worse, expensive. We didn’t have the bandwidth to do this along with everything else. In fact, in the very beginning, we didn’t have much we, either. We have a much bigger we in our fiftieth year, but we still can’t do everything else. Sigh.
Another nonexistent product: The digital cart machine
Read the entire blog here: https://www.eventideaudio.com/flashback-9-1-broadcast/