Mix
Here I am searching ebay for used audio gear, to feed my often unspoken desire to produce or play around with various musical synths and trance gear. Oogling at items like a Roland MC-303, or a TASCAM 122 MkIII, or even a Studer A810 reel to reel. Some of these items I even owned before I moved to the states! Sadly they were essentially given away by my dad when I moved out. But now I look back and wish I still had them. They are worth so much now, and heck I had a nice setup when I was a teenager.
Back in the year 2000, before YouTube or even iPods, and the idea of podcasts, I had figured out how to stream music live online. I had a Yahoo! chat room, and modified a keyboard to physically hold the Voice Chat button down with a switch. Sure enough it would continue to transmit. There was no timeout, like there would be today. I then build a studio around that, and was able to broadcast music, take requests, sing, play insreuments, and even take phone calls and patch them directly into the board.
Of course a lot of this I was able to do because I learned how to, and rescued used gear from my first real job at Standard Radio, in Toronto, Ontario.
I was hired in the Engineering department, and before long I was mixing bands, and working on the transmitters in the CN Tower and all sorts of stuff. It was the 2000's and Radio was in it's hay day. The end of the '90'tys saw the height of the Morning Show zoo scene, and a high focus on listenership and ratings. Competition was harsh and broadcasters guarded their audio secrets.
This brings me to the Audio Techniques vocal processors. These baby blue simple microphone preamp and compressors, which we used in the studios. Simple. But they worked. I've seen DBX processors and Symetrix, and we had an Orban for the main STL feed processor... but these Audio Techniques units... they were unique.
I never knew or appreciated just how unique tho. What was their story? They are esentially a DBX 160A which was hacked into a unique package built specifically for Standard. I didn't know this at the time, but these units were apprentely custom ordered for Standard Radio Inc. I wish I had a photo of one but sadly a lot of my photos from the time were lost. I just remember them fondly and wish I could have one in my collection.
But yeah, my collection... Well As some might know I have been super busy with life stuff. Hobbies are hard to find time for, and I think I will phase away from the model train hobby. Maybe my son will pick it up and that can be his hobby. I thinkfor me, what I have been collecting lately is usually budget audio gear of various sorts. Turntables, synths, etc.. Even the odd instrument like a BASS guitar, electric keyboard... Having a fun little setup again would be neat. Jam up some tunes, and roll out some beats.
But recalling memories of the radio station was still fun. I can see the equipment in my memory.
Equipment Listed by type:
Telephone and Over the Wire communications:
The pale gray and cyan silk screen of the Gentner phone hybrids. Newer Gentner units were a light gray with red and black print. The red Comrex Hotline. The Hotline was often used for events where a personality would be on site at some remote function and cut in with updates live from location (but music and programming was still sourced from the studio). The Telos Zypher, Comrex Matrix both ISDN units - we would use these for remote music shows, like at the Phoenix night club. These lines were all ordered and set up with Bell Broadcast division which would patch lines up on request from us. We would also frequency test the lines to confirm a workable broadcast frequency response. I also still have one of the first telephone hybreds used at Standard Radio, which was essentially an old Nortel speaker phone which was modified into a phone hybrid.
Microphone pre-amp and processors like I mentioned were likely Audio Techniques with some Symetric and DBX units added in after the fact. I believe after the rebuild a lot of the studios got Symetrix units.
Main broadcast processors were Orban Optimod 8200, and 9200 I believe? We also used the Telos Omnia 6EX HD+ FM Broadcast Audio Processor as the primary processor later on. However EZ Rock had it's own which Wally Lennox would only ever tweak. I forget what model it was.
The main broadcast rooms used McCurdy 8200 consoles at first, and CR8 used an old Ward Beck console. Production rooms used Yamaha O2R's I believe with a Tascam M-2600? I took home the Tascam M-2600 when that studio was upgraded to a Yamaha O2R also... And that TASCAM? gone.. no clue where it went. The broadcast studios all got new Ward Beck (WBS) R2K consoles once we rebuilt the studios to house EZ Rock 97.3.
We also added a SAS matrix audio routing switcher during that upgrade (After we bought Telemedia). A set up from the jackfield patches we used to have for inter-studio audio routing.
For STL's we used Mosely PCL 6000 series units in the 900MHz band. We had 2 links to the CN Tower, and one link to CFRB's site in Clarkson, Ontario from 2st Clair Ave West in Toronto where the studios were. The STL's were the main feed to the CN Tower, and a backup feed to Clarkson. We also had equalized and balanced Bell Broadcast supplied circuits going to each location which was a secondary path. In the case of CFRB, these circuits were the primary on air 'STL', as it was a cleaner signal than relying on the 900MHz signal point to point over such a long distance. For the CN Tower transmitters (Mix 99.9 and EZ Rock 97.3) the landline circuits were backup as the STL's quality was higher. We also had a Marti "RPU" which we used with Studio 1010 as a Remote, and another one in the traffic plane, and a transportable news coverage package with a pop up antenna.
Monitors are always an important thing in a studio. Almost everywhere in Standard Radio studios we used PSB speakers. Even at the transmitter sites we had PSB speakers, with Bryston 4B amps. This was a fairly standard setup for our studios as well. Some producers decided they wanted to try Tannoy Reveal monitors.
Microphones... Ah yes, everyone is always curious about microphones. Almost all broadcast studios were set up with Electro-Voice RE20's. These replaced Sennheiser MD421's from earlier times. Production studios tended to have Rode NT1's, or AKG C414XLS. We also had SM58's, AKG D202's, and AKG C451's for band setups, remote event setups and just as general surplus. I believe the new studios began being outfitted with Neumann BCM 104's in my final year there.
Headphones / Headsets... The Sony MDR-7506 was common. I still have a set from the radio station which works great. But more commonly used were the AKG K240 headphone. The K140's were also around, along with some K171's. Headsets were typically only used by the newsroom when I got there, and we were using AKG HSC 1 headsets. These were horrible to maintain. I had to unsolder the tiny wires on the microphone boom every time I had to replace the fragile cable which people always ripped. Eventually I upgraded everyone to AKG HSC 141 and 241 variants which even the CFRB hosts and some DJ's began to enjoy wearing in place of using their RE20's.
I believe all of this was destroyed when Bell Broadcast took over.