How Lewy Body Dementia Gripped Robin Williams

Great answer! I'm not sure why, but I've worked with many jocks and news people over the years and heard them on air before I did. Only a few matched my mental image of them.

Of course, I knew what you and the CKFH and CHUM jocks looked like because of the charts both stations put out. I believe that's you in the middle, with Duff Roman and Mike Williams on the left and Mal Faris and Tom Fulton on the right.

RadioActive wrote:

My rapidly aging car (and yes, I'm still vowing to get a new one) from 2006 has a cassette player in it. Certainly, the last of a vanishing breed. 

I would love to have a cassette machine in my car.  I have decent Rotel and Technics decks I could have used to make tapes for the car.

EDIT:  RA - I'm guessing you have a Ford Taurus.  I know those had a combo CD and cassette machine in the mid-2000s
 

I use Stingray which is included with Rogers cable, Amazon  (as I have Amazon Prime). and Sirius XM ( as I have this in my car).. My preferred app is Stingray.

I was going to say that cassettes have really been underrepresented here.  Sonically, the average cassette deck could yield 30-16,000 Hz response and fairly flat too.  With Dolby B-Type NR, the S/N was typically 65 dB.  Not bad at all.

Out of 100 cassettes, I may have had trouble with the odd one.  And by the mid 80s but especially the early 90s, pre-recorded cassettes were sounding pretty decent, especially WEA and CBS titles.  Even A&M had some good cassettes.

It's like when old jocks reminisce about the horrors of cart machines.  Towards the end, theere were some that rivaled half-tack open-reel at 7.5 IPS.  I think we want to remember things being worse than they were because it lets us tell the young-ins how "bad" we had it.
 

I had Google PlayMusic, loved it.. paid subscription... got converted to YouTube music when Google killed the old app.  Hate it.  Only reason I'm keeping it is because of my old grandfathered rate

Has anyone tried YouTube Music?  I believe it is a paid or subscription level service...

just curious....

mace wrote:

385 has been reserved for Toronto when 416/647/437 run out of phone numbers around 2025. And to think back in 1947, when area codes were first introduced in North America, 416 and 613 were the only ones assigned to Ontario. The 519 was introduced in 1953, 705 in 1957 and 807 in 1962.

Back in those days I don’t think you or I would have needed to use area codes, as direct-dial long distance didn’t exist yet. I believe you needed to call the operator to conduct a non-local call. Area codes were more of an internal routing tool back then, at least until direct-dial long distance was introduced.

torontostan wrote:

Juggie1 wrote:

Biggest issue with FCP is Safety Code 6! With the current load of rf stations including tv, fm, and communications companies, the rf level is at or just below the level where power reductions would start happening. Adding stations up there would further reduce the current power levels of existing stations and may even mean that the top floors may not be useable.

Also, FCP is just under 1000 feet and the CN master fm antenna is just under 1600 feet up! That height difference means much better reach at a much lower power level and a big hydro savings! Also lower maintenance costs at CN tower as only one antenna system to maintain. FCP would have to either spend lots of money for a common antenna system or each station would have to put big filters in to prevent reradiation issues!

Very interesting! I assume no FCP broadcasters are currently inhibited by these regulations? As in, are any operating at a lower power to limit overall radiation? 

I'm shocked people are allowed to work on the upper floors full-time as it stands now.... I wouldn't be surprised if the levels of radiation result in higher cancer rates among those BMO staffers. 

I guess all I'm wondering is if it would be cheaper (and easier) to move the CN FMs to FCP (and possibly include even more FMs on an Onmi-Directional Master FM system there), rather than upgrading the almost 50 year old systems at CN in their limited space and inaccessible spire. 
 

Oh I get you now, in terms of the accessability in the tower.  Well, I still find it strange how when it was built, the white radome on the antenna was installed first, then the antennas were put into place.  So im guessing a reverse order could be in process.  Who knows.  Incredible its working full time for that long with literally no issues.

 

The "lowly" cassette isn't really that bad, especially if you open one up to see the amazing engineering that makes it all work.  As you've discovered, they withstand an amazing amount of mistreatment and still provide decent output.

When I moved, I found a couple of boxes of cassettes (only a few were pre-recorded) I had basically forgotten about that were stuffed away in a closet.  I was overall rather impressed with the quality of the recordings that had been sitting around for, in some cases, about 40 years. A couple cassettes exhibited a small bit of print-through that you could only hear at the beginning of the tape but nothing objectionable.  I did have a pre-recorded cassette that didn't do well.  It was still sealed and had sticky shed syndrome.  I tossed it since I already have the LP.

I guess the thing is, we've been spoiled with today's CDs and lossless digital media.  It's easy to dismiss yesterday's technology but when you put into perspective, it really is quite amazing.
 

The Internet has changed many things, including letting those who care to check what their favourite (or least favourite) on-air personality looks like on their station's website. But that wasn't always the case. The cartoon above had me thinking of two scenarios:

-If you're an on-air personality, you've almost certainly had a listener come up to you and say "you don't look like you sound on the radio."

-And if you're a listener, you've probably been surprised by how a person you've heard for years but never seen actually looks. 

It's happened to me on occasion, although my on-air time was short. But I've been in both places. This is not meant as an insult, but I was never able to reconcile how the now departed Mike Stafford actually looks with the voice I heard coming out of the speaker. Not that he's a bad looking guy. I just had an entirely different mental image of him. 

Alternately, I have a close friend who's a newscaster. If you saw this guy, he looks like the stereotypical nerd - about 5'7", thick glasses, a bit unkempt. But then he opens his mouth and out comes this voice that sounds like it's coming from the bottom of the earth, a simply magnificent radio presence. 

Not that anyone should be judged on their appearance. It's just tough when you have a mental image of someone based solely on their voice and then they look nothing like you thought. It's tough to get that out of your mind when you hear them again. 

But that's part of the magic of the medium - and maybe reality should never intrude on that image. 

OK, time for one more dumb cartoon.

One of my best thrift shop finds was a set of tapes that included small, medium and major market Canadian radio content as well as some interesting music TV recordings .  I wrote about the tapes on the board about two years ago. Won the tapes in an auction for a very reasonable price.

The tapes include some CFCH and you can hear content from the station from 1970 and 1967 on the third and fourth clips at the link below. I have not uploaded all the content from these tapes yet and there is more of the station and others. I will probably upload anything else I find post 1966 as things were getting interesting by that time.

The 1970 portion is in excellent quality and the station was a full service rock station playing everything from Pepper Tree to Quicksilver Messenger Service. The 1967 content is not as good quality-wise but I enjoy the fuzz and love bead vibe of some of the music.

CFCH 1967 & 1970

Juggie1 wrote:

Biggest issue with FCP is Safety Code 6! With the current load of rf stations including tv, fm, and communications companies, the rf level is at or just below the level where power reductions would start happening. Adding stations up there would further reduce the current power levels of existing stations and may even mean that the top floors may not be useable.

Also, FCP is just under 1000 feet and the CN master fm antenna is just under 1600 feet up! That height difference means much better reach at a much lower power level and a big hydro savings! Also lower maintenance costs at CN tower as only one antenna system to maintain. FCP would have to either spend lots of money for a common antenna system or each station would have to put big filters in to prevent reradiation issues!

Very interesting! I assume no FCP broadcasters are currently inhibited by these regulations? As in, are any operating at a lower power to limit overall radiation? 

I'm shocked people are allowed to work on the upper floors full-time as it stands now.... I wouldn't be surprised if the levels of radiation result in higher cancer rates among those BMO staffers. 

I guess all I'm wondering is if it would be cheaper (and easier) to move the CN FMs to FCP (and possibly include even more FMs on an Onmi-Directional Master FM system there), rather than upgrading the almost 50 year old systems at CN in their limited space and inaccessible spire. 
 

Thanks, Fitz.  That was fun.  Even if I blew it big time. I honestly thought the crackle I heard to be too easy and that it was in there to throw someone off.  If hadn't been such a cynic thinking I was maybe being tricked I could have had one right. 

I was amazed by the lack of surface noise/tape hiss on your transfers.  I'm suspecting it's just that these ageing ears of mine are starting to betray me.

What a drag it is getting old!
 

Reading their press release, the current owner of Visa Radio's grandfather started the original CFCH! What an amazing story, and no wonder this station got that branding!