Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Old live radio performance technology

This is topic Old live radio performance technology in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 11-05-2017, 06:55 PM:

I'm just now reading a book that was written in 1935 and the characters are playing in a band that "catches a wire at a nitery."

This means that they have a contract to do live radio broadcasts from a nightclub. And I remember seeing or reading about stuff like that before: "Live at the Kit Kat Club, here's Joe Blow and his orchestra!".

My question is, how did they get the live performance back to the radio station? Telephone hookup? Even with the relatively low standards for sound reproduction of that time, that seems pretty limited.

Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 11-05-2017, 07:29 PM:

Yes, telephone lines. A radio station would order a dedicated copper pair from the program origination source to the studio. It often went through a central office since that's where all the cables in town come together. Often a dedicated "unloaded" (no loading coils and no bridge taps) pair for the whole path is all that's required. An equalizer at the studio end loads the line more for low frequencies than highs to equalize the frequency response (without equalization, there's quite a bit of high frequency attenuation). If the link is long, it may be broken into segments with equalization and amplification at the end of each segment.

In the 1930s, the technology was pretty well established. NBC did the first coast to coast radio broadcast using telephone lines in 1927.

Harold
(more broadcast history at http://bh.hallikainen.org )

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 11-05-2017, 10:28 PM:

Interesting.

Did they just throw a mike in front of the band and call it good enough, or were they using multiple microphones and a mixer board?

Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 11-05-2017, 11:44 PM:

I don't really know about that. I suspect a lot of stuff was single microphone, though.

Harold

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 11-05-2017, 11:51 PM:

A lot of old films and photos show a gang surrounding a single microphone so you're probably right about that.

Thanks for the information, Harold. Old tech like this is interesting stuff.

When trying to do my own research about this I read that the standard RCA microphone had two live sides and two dead ones, so people making a recording or broadcast (like a radio play) could face each other while performing. Another interesting little fact, as well.

Posted by Sam D. Chavez (Member # 1841) on 11-06-2017, 12:04 AM:

Take a look at American Epic, episode 8 for a look at original generation single mic recording using a weight driven recording lathe. Some of this apparatus shown came through one of my warehouse partners stock. Nick Berg is the recording engineer and producer of this program.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-06-2017, 10:43 AM:

An often told story in British broadcasting folklore is that when the Crystal Palace in South London burned down in 1936, a very young Richard Dimbleby was sent by the BBC to report on it. A recording crew was not available, so he went to a public call box close by, engineers back at the studio jerry rigged a way of patching the connection at the other end straight to air, and his commentary on the fire thus became the UK's first live outside broadcast. Sadly, they could not figure out a way of duplicating the feed to a disc cutter (at least, not until after the subject of the broadcast had been reduced to a pile of ashes), and so no recording was made.

On the subject of weird and wacky stillborn technologies, about a decade ago I was given a demonstration of a privately owned and restored Philips-Miller recorder. It literally engraved an optical audio trace out of black film emulsion, which was then played back using a conventional photocell, of the sort used in cinema projectors.

The owner had hooked it to a modern Cambridge Audio consumer integrated amplifier and budget hi-fi speakers (can't remember which model) - something with much more range than the tube amps and speakers in use at the time. The audio was astonishing: subjectively speaking, just as good as a late '50s mono LP, and probably more detailed in the high end. Apparently the BBC used them experimentally, along with the Blattnerphone, in the 1930s, but went back to using disc recording until EMI got their hands on captured Nazi magnetic recording technology in the late '40s (Ampex in the US did at around the same time), and launched the BTR series of tape recorders.

Posted by Kenneth Wuepper (Member # 1174) on 11-06-2017, 11:44 AM:

Reginald Webb, a theatre organ teacher in Detroit Michigan played his home pipe organ for accompaniment of the radio program that featured canaries chirping to the music. This was over WJR, a clear channel AM radio station. The canaries were in an aviary and their chirping was sent by copper to the WJR studio in the Fisher Building downtown. The organ was sent by copper to the Studio as well. The two were mixed at that point and sent on the air.

Neither the birds nor the organist heard each other, only the listeners heard the "mix" at home.

The organ pickup was a little tube amplifier that took one microphone output and sent it over the 600 Ohm telco line.

Reg often told of the time he began his music only to have the phone begin ringing. He played loudly to cover up the ring so it would not be heard on the air. It rang throughout the entire broadcast.

After the time of the program was over he went to the phone and answered it angrily. The engineer from the station was calling to tell him that he forgot to turn on the amplifier. They had substituted some recorded music "for the birds".

KEN

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 11-06-2017, 01:29 PM:

I've always been a Jack Benny fan and have collected a lot of his radio shows. I know they did their shows in front of a live audience, but I assume, since it was radio, that they didn't do anything in terms of scenery, costumes etc. I've seen picture of Jack and other members of his cast just standing at a microphone reading lines out of a script. It's hard to imagine people wanting to go to a theater to see a show done like that, but I suppose seeing the celebrities plus the fascination of being present at a live broadcast was enough to draw a big crowd of fans.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 11-06-2017, 01:46 PM:

The ubiquity and instant availability of recorded music today certainly creates a different sort of musical culture than what existed some years ago, before recordings were commonly available.

As stated above, the book that I was reading is a contemporary novel written in 1935. At one point the characters attend a posh "penthouse party" where the guests are dancing foxtrots and waltzes to music that's playing on the radio.

As you can see, I found the musical aspects of the story very striking, though the novel is actually an early tough-guy noir, i.e "booze, babes and bullets".

Some of the story takes place in and around Chicago nightclubs. At that time a live band was apparently the best option for music in your establishment, and a few years before that it would have been the only option. And if you wanted to have music in your home you would have had to play it yourself.

I have read that sheet music sales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were driven by sales of cheap pianos, and sheet music was more-or-less the equivalent of the 45 rpm singles that were being sold when I was a teenager, i.e this is what you bought when you wanted to obtain music.

In short, printed sheet music was a huge industry at one time, which was replaced by sales of recorded singles and LP records, followed by about twenty years of CD's, replaced by digital music sales (and mp3 piracy) and today the music scene seems be largely driven by streaming audio channels and subscription sales to the same.

I'm sure that the changeover from live to recorded music in commercial establishments had a big effect on the labour market for musicians, as well. A mediocre musician who could have made a living out of being in a backing band or an average torch signer would suddenly find him or herself out of work.

There's probably a dissertation in there for a musical history student. [Smile]

Posted by Alexandre Pereira (Member # 9295) on 11-06-2017, 04:35 PM:

Radioland Murders is a great film that relives - or at least re-invents the magic of live radio broadcasts...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yqj62w1Bao

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-06-2017, 04:53 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
I have read that sheet music sales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were driven by sales of cheap pianos, and sheet music was more-or-less the equivalent of the 45 rpm singles that were being sold when I was a teenager, i.e this is what you bought when you wanted to obtain music.

Correct, and you can also add the player piano into that mix. However, actually playing the piano was a far more widely taught skill before the advent of recorded and broadcast music than it is now, and how playable a given song or piece was for someone who only played the piano as a hobby (not for a living), was a major determinant in how commercially successful it was.

If you read biographies of Scott Joplin, an interesting (to me, at any rate) aspect of his career is the constant battles he had with his publisher, because a lot of his rags were difficult enough that only a professional musician could really play them. One of the reasons The Entertainer became such a huge hit was because an amateur pianist of average ability can easily handle it (by the same token, some Beethoven sonatas, e.g. #7, can be played by someone like me, because they were commissioned for average ability amateur pianists. But the Hammerklavier? Nah, haven't got a spare lifetime to practice that one!). But a lot of his other stuff (The Cascades and The Country Club come to mind) simply isn't.

I'm not sure that stride jazz would ever have become popular if it hadn't coincided with recorded sound growing into a widespread consumer technology. Listen to pianists like James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, and what you're hearing is virtuoso enough that no way in hell could even most professional pianists do that, let alone an amateur. Before recording and broadcasting, music had to be playable and singable by people who, afterwards, just listened to it.

quote: Kenneth Wuepper
Reginald Webb, a theatre organ teacher...

Was being called Reginald an unofficial job requirement of being a movie theater organist in the 1930s? Reginald Dixon was arguably Britain's best known, and one of very few to become a broadcasting star.

Posted by Kenneth Wuepper (Member # 1174) on 11-06-2017, 06:57 PM:

Leo,

The name is where the similarity ended.

KEN

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 11-06-2017, 07:32 PM:

For awhile in the early 70s, a station here in NYC, WMGM (yes, at one time, the studio also owned a radio station in a top 40 market in NYC) produced a weekly, live broadcast show that mimicked the live drama shows of the late 40s and early 50s -- actors reading scripts accompanied by mood music and sound effects. The were great entertainment -- now we have the same kind of thing with audio books.

I remember listen to some of these and from my recollection, they had very high production values, I assume, in part, because they had a wealth of talent to call upon as well as scripts that maybe didn't make it to the screen but could be re-purposed for the radio and unlike the earlier radio dramas and soap operas that used an organ as the music source (why organ and not a piano or a small ensemble?), they also had stock music as well as the ability to pre-record sound effects probably the parent studio's foley know-how came in pretty handy.

We first produced a live radio program, "Brooklyn Center Presents" that at first was sent to the studio on two copper-to-copper lines (or "dry circuits") that were nothing more than cables that went from point to point thru the telephone company switching stations but bi-passed all electronics and switches. They basically were giving us a run of audio cable from the source output (our mixer) to the terminal point (the station's input). Both sides had the big eq boxes -- probably the ones Harold mentioned -- that work something close to magic, at least in my mind, given the distance from us to the studio (Brooklyn to Manhattan); I expected the end result was going to mangled by dirty ground noise, hum, hi freq degradation and stereo crosstalk. But we did three live broadcasts this way, then finally just went recording everything and shipping the programs on R2R 1/4in tape -- much more control, but not as much of the exhilaration of doing it live.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 11-07-2017, 01:17 PM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
Before recording and broadcasting, music had to be playable and singable

... and some of that sheet music is amazingly expensive. I just saw a waltz dated 1904 with a pre-printed price on it of One Dollar. For just one single waltz. And an 1893 "Fantasie" for 75 cents. Leapin' lizards! That's about $20 to $25 in today's money.

Today a whole brand new book of sheet music containing 12 or 20 pieces might cost that much. And the market is far smaller now (or at least so I assume) though I suppose the actual cost of printing and binding is cheaper today than it was back then.

Some of the million-plus selling sheet music (After the Ball, etc.) must have made a fortune for someone. Even some of the smaller stuff, if it was sold at anything close to list price, would have raked it in pretty good.

I wonder if the composers actually saw much of that or if the publishers managed to insert themselves into the trough in their stead.

Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 11-12-2017, 03:48 PM:

The first radio station I worked at in the 1980’s had this type of setup for a weekly live church service broadcast.

Posted by Rick Raskin (Member # 1561) on 11-12-2017, 04:24 PM:

quote: Frank Angel
We first produced a live radio program, "Brooklyn Center Presents" that at first was sent to the studio on two copper-to-copper lines (or "dry circuits") that were nothing more than cables that went from point to point thru the telephone company switching stations but bi-passed all electronics and switches

Not exactly. Those 2 copper pairs would have been part of a 4-wire special circuit equalized and amplified in the central office. To the subscriber they would have looked like dry circuits.

At one time we were provisioning ISDN lines for broadcast quality using techniques like inverse multiplexing. ISDN though was viewed as too little too late, while ATM was seen as too much too soon. In the long run IP won the war.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-12-2017, 09:58 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
... and some of that sheet music is amazingly expensive. I just saw a waltz dated 1904 with a pre-printed price on it of One Dollar. For just one single waltz. And an 1893 "Fantasie" for 75 cents. Leapin' lizards! That's about $20 to $25 in today's money.

Like the VHS tapes of the 1980s that were intended for rental stores and cost $100 each, those prices factored in that the music would be played in saloons, dance halls, and other public places, and sometimes to large audiences. The price effectively included a public performance license.

Performance rights organizations (e.g. MCPS, ASCAP) didn't emerge until the 19-teens. They introduced the business model whereby broadcasters and live performers paid copyright owners (e.g. music publishers and record companies), through these agencies, a per performance fee that reflected the size of the audience. Before then, you paid a one-time fee for sheet music or piano rolls, for which could do what you liked with them.

Before the emergence of broadcasting and recording, composers and performers were usually paid one-time fees, rather than per use royalties, for the rights to their work, too.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 11-13-2017, 08:56 AM:

In 1936 J Frank Willis broadcast from a mine disaster in Nova Scotia live via phone line for 76 hrs on the then new CBC radio and was picked up on many US radio stations all by telephone
http://broadcasting-history.ca/personalities/willis-james-frank

Year Born:
1908
Year Died:
1969
Pioneer

Willis, James Frank (1908-1969)

J. Frank Willis, made famous by the 1936 Moose River mine disaster, wanted to be a commercial artist and when he was 20 went from his hometown of Halifax to New York to study art. After he qualified, he worked for a time at the Paramount studios at Long Island. But he could see the depression coming and in 1930 he went home and into business for himself.

His radio career started with freelance work for CHNS Halifax which had its debut in 1925. He produced, wrote and announced radio shows, and then produced and acted in plays, including a Sherlock Holmes series. His younger brother Austin, later to find success in show business, also had his start with a group of actors who were heard in the early days of CHNS. Frank started an evening hour of poetry reading to organ music, initially called Harbour Lights and later Atlantic Nocturne, and produced a Sunday afternoon piano music program, Ampico. They brought him a total of $15 a week, he recounted in the memoir J. Frank Willis: My life on the Air, by Jock Carroll.

The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, forerunner of the CBC, was formed and CHNS originated programs for the new network until the CBC established its own Halifax studios. Frank gave up his commercial art and accepted the job of regional director for the Maritimes. His job was to produce and announce shows and look for talent.

In 1936, the Moose River mine disaster occurred, when two company directors from Toronto and an employee were trapped on Easter Sunday by a rock fall in an abandoned mine 100 kilometres east of Halifax. Frank was the only CRBC staffer east of Montreal but initially he was denied permission to cover the story in competition with the print media. By the time he received permission, the story was eight days old and rescuers had just detected renewed signs of life below.

He took with him an old table microphone and engineers Cecil Landry of CHNS and Arleigh Canning of the CRBC. The multitude of print reporters on the scene initially blocked him from using the single telephone line that connected the scene but Maritime Telephone and Telegraph ruled that Frank could have two five-minute spots an hour. Then he had to negotiate with every party-line user on the line not to eavesdrop but to listen to his broadcasts on the radio - otherwise the reports would have been almost inaudible.

He made his first broadcast at 6 p.m. and continued every half hour for 69 hours with a single break when the CRBC forced him to take two hours off after a furious outburst on the air about inaccurate print reports.

Frank's reports were carried live on 708 radio stations through Canada and the U.S. and also across the U.K. and France. He made a record 99 broadcasts. The event revolutionized the understanding of what radio could do. It had been perceived as a mainly entertainment medium. Now it was recognized as a fast - even live - news source. One of the two rescued men (the third died) said later the rescue would probably not have been made but for the presence of the news media because officials had given the trapped men up for dead. The newspapers of The Canadian Press voted the Moose River rescue the top radio news story of the first half of the 20th Century.

Frank's rich voice was already familiar to radio listeners across Canada for his poetry readings. Atlantic Nocturne was revived under the title Nocturne when Frank was moved to Toronto. He was joined by the famous British theatre pipe organist, Quentin McLean.

With his newfound fame, Frank was flooded with lucrative offers but stayed with the CRBC and then the CBC. He was sent on a producer exchange with the Australian Broadcasting Commission and returned in 1939 to help with arrangements for the first royal tour of Canada and to produce radio documentaries. In the late '50s he switched to television and, until he retired in 1963, hosted the CBC-TV current affairs program Close-Up.

J. Frank Willis died of a heart attack on October 26th 1969.

Written by Jerry Fairbridge - November, 2002

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 11-13-2017, 01:34 PM:

Rick, they did have those big equalizer boxes (about the size of a shoe box) on our end. I always A/B monitored the live broadcast signal in stereo and mono to see how the mono sounded -- always concerned that if there was even the slightest time delay component between L & R channels, it wreak havoc on the mono FM radios. I never heard the tell-tale flanging that you would have if there were differential problems. At the time, it pretty much amazed me how good they were able to get full frequency stereo to sound over humble telco unshielded copper pairs running for miles across town when at times we have had hair-pulling ground hum problems just within a single building.