[BC] Re: 50's/60's Audio Processing

Robert Orban rorban
Fri Dec 22 17:24:03 CST 2006


At 10:40 PM 12/21/2006, bill Allen wrote:
>Some stations used a EMT brand "gold plate" reverb
>unit for the reverb (echo)
>
>it was a wood box about 5 feet high and wide and
>around 2 feet deep.
>
>an interesting peice of technology at the time.
>
>it had a large metal plate suspended by springs at the
>corners and sides.
>
>at one end of the plate there were tranducers the fed
>the audio into the plate by vibration and at the other
>end were mic like devices the recovered the audio with
>the reverb caused by the plate.
>
>in the center of the plate was a pad that led to an
>outside control for adjusting how much pressure
>the pad had ageinst the plate and controled the amount
>of reverbration.

There were two EMT plate models. The original, and more common one, was 
huge and used steel plates. The gold plate reverb was smaller and came 
later. I don't think that they sold very many of the gold ones because the 
digital reverb juggernaut was already upon them. Indeed, they helped start 
it with the EMT 250. This was designed by Barry Blesser and his associates, 
and was the first "live" real-time digital reverb. (There were earlier 
digital reverb algorithms like Schroeder's, but they required batch 
processing of computer files.)

Bob Orban 




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