[BC] indentifying the equipment

[Mark Humphrey]

The commercial station in my hometown bought a Sparta 4-banger which
was later donated to our high school station.  However, neither they
nor we could ever keep all four decks working at once.   And in every
radio studio photo I've seen showing those machines, there was always
one deck pulled out -- so apparently this was a common problem.

While on this nostalgic topic, perhaps we should vote on "worst cart
machine".  A few nominations, in addition to Sparta:

MaCarTa
Key Cart
RCA

By the way, I remember seeing several Ampex Cue Mat machines sitting
on the shelf at WESB, Bradford, PA in 1979 but don't know where they
ended up.  One of these would have made an interesting collectors
item.

Mark

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Glen Kippel <glen.kippel at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Tapecaster" was a regular cart machine.  When I went to work for KUDE in oceanside, they had just pulled out their two Gates Spot Tape or Spotcaster (I don't remember which) machines and had put in a Sparta 4-banger.  That wide magnetic belt with the slider was a headache, especially when the jock didn't quite get the handle centered on the tape track."Spotmaster" was of course a cart machine -- one of the first, IIRC.  They used the Viking mechanism that used a cocking lever.
>
> Anybody besides me remember the Ampex machines that used a REAL floppy disk, about the size of an LP?
>