I remember sitting in a restaurant in the late '70s and the establishment wanted to provide a classier atmosphere. They had what was obviously a cart playing Beethoven's 6th Symphony; it faded up in the middle of the first movement, played through until it faded out in the middle of the last movement, then re-cued and played the segment again. It did this about three times during that, my only visit to this restaurant.
db
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On 2013-06-05, at 10:22 AM, "Morton, David Lindsay Jr" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Finally! Something I can comment on!
>
> Bob says: "I remember, back in the early '70s, a fair number of cart machines used in radio stations that had removable guides for playing the smaller, more often seen carts. "
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> Me - This is essentially correct. The early recorders or players for the broadcast market (mostly early 60s) could play the larger sizes. It's interesting that you assumed that the evolution of the cart was from large to small - like so many other things in the history of electronics. In fact, the larger sizes were not a precursor to the small carts, they all appeared at the same time.
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> There were lots of companies selling the background music systems based on the Fidelipac or "Eash" cartridge design at least to the end of the 70s, maybe even later, and there are a lot of players still in existence. These typically have different standards than a broadcast cart - tape speeds, number of tracks, etc. If you can figure out which system you have, you could pretty easily score a player on ebay if you really wanted to.
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> Rhett says: " it was probably used in a profanity delay system for radio broadcast."
> Me -Maybe, but why use the large (and more expensive) cartridge? It's probably a background music application.
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>
> Richard says: "the C size. It runs about a half hour if it's a normal NAB cartridge (and Fidelipac was a major supplier of NAB cartridges."
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> Me - The large cartridges, used in background music systems, could run much, much longer than that. The medium was designed to provide continuous playback and to play back relatively long recordings; hence their marketing in the background music market as an inexpensive alternative to Muzak. If indeed this is background music, the recording is probably several hours long and played at 3 ¾ ips - maybe even slower.
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> You guys are not in agreement about how to play it : "you can spool the tape out of the cartridge and onto a reel and then deal with it as any other reel-to-reel tape" vs "there is no way (short of finding a working deck that takes the C-size) to easily find out what's on it." Versus "What I normally do -- and I just completed 13 standard NAB cartridges -- is remove the tape from the shell and transfer it on a reel-to-reel machine, but I do not have the winders to put the tape back in the shell so I return the tape to you on a reel"
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> I'm not an archivist, but I'm surprised to that people on this list are suggesting butchering the original to make a copy. The archivists I've met over the years generally don't want to treat original recordings like this. Maybe times have changed. But since we're on the subject of potentially risky playback methods, I would add that the loop can be pulled out of the cartridge a little bit and played on a regular ol' reel-to-reel if necessary. The open reel machine doesn't, of course, continue to pull out more and more tape, because pulling tape out of the cartridge causes the reel inside to turn, wrapping the played tape back onto the outside of the tape pack. Ah, the magic of the endless loop. So when you're done, you still just have a little extra tape hanging out of the cartridge. So you just sort of tuck the loop back in there and it will (usually) still play just fine if you try to play it on the correct machine - the loop will self-adjust and the slack will disappear. Or it will self-destruct the next time you play it. Just as every fart is a gamble after age 40, so too is this method of playback.
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> There's a little more backround on the history of tape cartridges here: https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/24235 - chapter 8
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> Dave Morton
>
>
>
> From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ARSCLIST automatic digest system
> Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2013 12:00 AM
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> Subject: ARSCLIST Digest - 3 Jun 2013 to 4 Jun 2013 (#2013-156)
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