Carts "Were Made" for Top 40

[jon]

Top 40 Radio during periods of high spot loads was pretty hard to do prior to the advent of multiple Cart Machines in the control room. I'm only guessing, but I suspect that Top 40 Radio drove the development of Cart Machines for Radio. The topic of Carts came up in the WING-1410 thread.

I never really thought much about it until I heard a KEX Portland Top 40 aircheck from the late 1950s. Top 40 was new to the station at the time, and there was a reluctance to even install reel to reel tape machines, let alone MacKenzie Repeaters, the precursor of the cart machine, because the control room had recently been completely redesigned with brand new equipment, before Top 40, of course.

On KEX, it was all done with turntables. Even the jingles! Admittedly, jingles were generally longer in those days. Even big stations like KEX in the late 1950s had gone to the DJ approach, AKA announcer/operator, so there was a lot of cueing to do. Some songs weren't even 2 minutes long during that period of Top 40, but they felt long after cueing up all those 30 second commercials, 10 second jingles and 5 second News intro. It is no wonder that a lot of ads and Legal IDs were done live by the DJ. It was just easier than cueing up yet another piece of vinyl.

5 years ago, I first saw a 1970s recording of Robert W. Morgan doing a daily dance/music show on KHJ-TV in Los Angeles. I soon learned that each of the lengthy commercial breaks, complete with station ID and program promos, were spliced together into one long piece of film, so an operator had some chance of getting it right as the show was live to air.

Quite recently, I discovered that some Top 40 radio stations had done the same thing before the days of carts, but after the advent of reel to reel tape machines. During periods of high spot load, complete commercial breaks were aired as a single entity spliced together by Production on reel to reel tape.

A lot of us who got into Radio in late 1960s felt, at the time, as if Cart Machines had been around forever. But you can hear mid-1960s KJR airchecks where (some or all?) commercials were clearly being played off vinyl. The cue burn at the start and noise from scratches and dirt at other points.

Smaller stations lived without cart machines for a long time. An extreme example of minimum facilities was KONP in Port Angeles. 250 watts on 1450. The last time I visited them, in the summer of 1969, I knew enough and had enough time to really understand what they had. One control room, that was it. Production and On-Air all rolled into one. No cart machines. Two turntables. One mic.

I never quite understood how the board worked, as it wasn't quite a full two channel setup. You activated some switch and only one turntable could be used on air. For Production, all you had was the other turntable and the mic. I don't remember seeing a reel to reel tape recorder in the control room; any paid religious programming came in on vinyl.

Instead of a cart machine, they had this huge metal cylinder with a form of magnetic oxide painted on it at regular intervals. A single record/play magnetic tape head could be moved up and down the cylinder and locked into place at regularly-spaced notches. Push the button and the cylinder started to rotate. A full rotation took 60 seconds.

With the magic switch turned on, you could record to the cylinder and listen to the results. Turned off, the cylinder could only be used to play off one of the concentric circles "on air" or on the cue channel.

As late as mid-1971, CHQM-FM only had a single stereo cart machine in the FM control room. Any shows done there, rather than off the automation machine, required the operator to push the stop button, pull out the cart, insert the next cart, and push Start at least once in every break, as there was always at least one commercial and a 25 second musical ID that were CHQM's signature piece at that point in time. It is not like the control room was never used. Terry Timms operated for Maurice Foisy there every morning for three hours, live to air, and also recording the music played on to 10.5" reels of tape for use on voice tracked programs. All other vinyl-based shows heard only on CHQM-FM had to be aired from there, too.

Once September 1971 rolled around, with its end to simulcasting except for all nights, the situation quickly became intolerable as the number of shows done in the FM control room more than doubled. A second cart machine was installed within a month or so.

My favourite cart machine setup was in the CHQM AM control room. To your left was a rack of three cart machines, spaced well apart. The bottom machine was almost on the ground, so you really had to bend over to load it. But it only had one purpose: to air on FM only during a "Simulcast Split". Push the magic button during a period of AM/FM simulcasting, and top and bottom cart machines both fired at once, one aired on AM and the other on FM. The purpose of the exercise was to air separate 25 second musical IDs on AM and FM.

[scottrussell]

Great Piece on Carts, Jon. As an old announcer who many times had an armful of carts, (and broke in with records) that hits a chord. When I worked at CKDA Victoria in the '80s I remember having a stack of spots AND a stack of songs (fidelipacs at the time, they broke better than Aristocarts when you tossed them!)
Cheers!

[radiofan]

In the early 1970s, Top 40 stations started the practice of carting their music library. Current hits that got played numerous time a day no longer suffered from cue burn, there was no more replacing 45s with
fresh copies each week, jocks couldn't put scratch marks through the latest Bobby Sherman or Donny Osmond hits. Once the oldies libraries were carted, there was no longer the chance of a B side or an album
track being played by accident.

Carted music added some variety to automated stations. There was no longer the need to have all your music on 10" reels and having it play in the same order day after day. The reel to reel decks were
replaced with cart carousels that had only been used for commercials. The engineering staff at CKNW/CFMI in Vancouver soon discovered that there was a major phasing problem with Fidelipac carts that
were used for music. Don Kalmakoff and his crew solved that problem by reinventing the cart when they came up with the much superior Aristocart. Not only did the new Aristocart solve their problem at
CFMI with it's IGM automation system, it became a money maker for the company until the 1990s. The carts were manufactured in a strip mall across the parking lot from CKNW/CFMI's New Westminster studios
and sold to radio stations worldwide until the late 1990s when digital storage became the new industry standard.

[groundwave]

Carts may have been "made" for top 40, but that shouldn't imply they were ideal for playing all types of popular music. While there's no denying the convenience they brought to on-air personnel such as jocks and board operators, the audibility of the endless loop's wow and flutter tended to range from just detectable to horrendous - especially for listeners blessed (cursed?) with a reasonably good sense of musical pitch. For me, hearing the wobbly sounding piano notes of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water as played via cart on CHED Edmonton (circa April of 1970) was pretty much the audio equivalent of having my finger nails extracted with pliers. On a reasonably good DX evening, a quick spin up the dial to Calgary's CKXL (which at the time still used turntables for music play) revealed the same (then top-10) song playing smoothly with no obvious pitch-related effects.

[jon]

Carts may have been "made" for top 40, but that shouldn't imply they were ideal for playing all types of popular music. While there's no denying the convenience they brought to on-air personnel such as jocks and board operators, the audibility of the endless loop's wow and flutter tended to range from just detectable to horrendous - especially for listeners blessed (cursed?) with a reasonably good sense of musical pitch. For me, hearing the wobbly sounding piano notes of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water as played via cart on CHED Edmonton (circa April of 1970) was pretty much the audio equivalent of having my finger nails extracted with pliers. On a reasonably good DX evening, a quick spin up the dial to Calgary's CKXL (which at the time still used turntables for music play) revealed the same (then top-10) song playing smoothly with no obvious pitch-related effects.

You would have loved Seattle Radio. At different times, KJR and KOL sped up their turntables.

Actually, I wasn't thinking of music on cart when I started this thread, as I actually never worked at a station that played music on cart. CHQM-AM started doing so about 6 months after I left.

I was more thinking of the tightness of Top 40 radio and how short many of the formatic elements were. Jingles were often 2 seconds or less. And more than a few DJs used sound effects to spice things up. Both would have been near impossible to do without carts in the pre-computer days.

Music on cart would actually make some things very hard to do. For example, the DJ who talked over the musical intro of a 45, grabbed hold of the record just before the vocal began, simultaneously hitting the jingle on cart, and then letting the record go just as the jingle ended. Is it any wonder that most Top 40 stations had well worn felt pads on the turntables? I always thought it was just slip cueing the beginning of the song, but now realize it was often done at the start of the vocal. Point being: although carted music made for instant starts, I cannot see how you would ever stop the music just before the vocal, and pause it while you ran a jingle. Unless you actually carted it that way, with the jingle just before the vocal.

[radiofan]

I always thought it was just slip cueing the beginning of the song, but now realize it was often done at the start of the vocal. Point being: although carted music made for instant starts, I cannot see how you would ever stop the music just before the vocal, and pause it while you ran a jingle. Unless you actually carted it that way, with the jingle just before the vocal.

Most cart machines had STOP buttons .. so you could do the same trick .. stopping the song right before vocal.

In my eyes, Dave McCormick was the master of reaching his left hand over to the turntable and stopping the tune if his talk bit was going to stomp the vocal. He was doing this in the 70's when he was at CKNW, so I guess he mastered the technique years before at CFUN and KMAK.