Keep The Needle Peaking

Disc Jockeys in the 1960s manually cued up and played either 45 rpm single records or 33 1/3 LPs on turntables. After a few dozen plays these vinyl recordings tended to develop irritating scratchy, hissing noise and needed to be replaced with duplicate copies. One of the hazards of the operation was forgetting to adjust speeds of the turntables back to the 45 rpm position or vice versa when going back and forth between album cuts and 45s. Another no-no was to accidently play the wrong side of a 45 or the wrong cut on an LP thereby subjecting the astute listening audience to an unfamiliar rendition of a non-hit song. In the warped minds of radio programmers such mistakes or a few seconds of peaceful silence known by the nefarious title of dead air, would surely cause every single listener to tune out never to return. Such minor errors caused brief disruptions in the ebb and flow of the station sound and almost always led to a frantic demand from a management type for an explanation. The only answer was totally obvious but a DJ could at least feel confident of having at least one listener. The introduction of cartridge tapes in the 60s meant that most of the commercials could be recorded and played back much easier than wrestling with reel to reel recorders. For the first few years tape cartridges could only play a little more than 60 seconds of sound without distortion, but as advances were made in the manufacturing process, by the mid-70s most 45 rpm music was being carted up and beamed over the airwaves. Unless a particular LP contained very popular numbers they were still played on turntables. How could such an efficient system be surpassed? Cartridge tapes had a tendency to break or jam occasionally leading to more hotline calls from Program Directors, Operations Managers, Assistant Managers or someone with an impressive title frantically inquiring as to what had happened. In the late 80s another great leap sideways saw the introduction of the compact disc. Called CDs in the interest of alphabet letter economy, these small, super-sensitive music delivery systems were touted as being far superior in sound quality to any previous recording device and practically indestructible. This was before it was discovered that a speck of dust or a fingerprint could render them inoperable and someone with decent hearing noticed that the sound reproduction was actually better on the old vinyl LPs. Nevertheless, progress made vinyl records collectors’ items. For a brief period in the late 80s, some stations piddled with a system of small cartridge tapes containing digital audio. Once again, saving radio people from using too many big words, they were known as the DAT system. The little cartridges were expensive and like all tape, theirs became brittle and lost quality as it aged. DAT never really competed with CDs and I presume they ended up in yard sales next to 8 track cartridge tapes so dat’s dat. Today, unless some modern Edison has come out with a new sound reproduction system this morning, radio stations still rely on CDs to an extent and most have the music programmed directly into computers using a program known as Maestro. While the world outside the radio studios went through the Vietnam war, the struggle for civil rights, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Jack and Bobby Kennedy, the sexual revolution, the hippy generation, the race to the moon, and ever-changing musical tastes, we meandered from vinyl to cassette, to CD and DAT to music on computer and like the man said, “The hits just keep on coming!