[QuadList] Introductions

Wed Aug 6 14:38:07 CDT 2008

Wow, another RCA guy!  My quad career ran from 1985-1998, with TR-600's.
 Our office now contracts the duplication out, but I still have eight
TR-600's in varying states of repair, numerous headwheel panels and
reasonably complete documentation.  I loved the ability to go from high
to low-band playback by flipping two switches.

Anyone still using TR-600's?

Steve Greene
Archivist
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
(301) 837-1772

>>> jpo at prestodigital.ca 8/6/2008 12:22:30 PM >>>

I feel like a total junior here... didn't spend much time with
engineering Quads, but I do have a special fondness for them as an
operator.

 My history with Quad tape spanned 1976-1985.  I worked in two
facilities; an on-air station in Saskatoon, Sask (Canada), and a
high-end post house  in Toronto.  The on-air station was an RCA house,
but converted to AMPEX when Type-C took over with VPR-2s. Then they went
SONY.  The Toronto house was AMPEX all the way.

I worked first as an engineer, then as an operator/editor at the TV
station, which had five machines in its tape room and two in a truck for
location taping.  
     The machines (as I recall) consisted of: one TR-70C, used for
mastering and editing "Hi-Band" commercial programming (no timecode)

     two TR-60s, used for on-air program and commercial playback
('short' run) and donor source video for production

    one TR-4(5?) Lo-band recorder for programming tape delay, and

    one TR-3 (?) Lo-band recorder, also for tape delay.

The VTRs in the truck were also TR-3's if I've got that right -- they
were the horizontal flat-bed type recorders.

We avoided Lo-band where we could, but because half the machines in the
mix were Lo-band only, scheduling was critical.  Lots of midnight and
very early AM shifts doing the commercial runs for the day -- this was
before the availability of a cart machine for this market.  Eventually
they installed a Betacart-- circa 1986.
It was during this time that VT playback traffic went from somewhere
around 70-80 plays a day to north of 250, so the department was under
enormous pressure, handling commercial on-air, program delay,
production, news, etc., all with ONE operator and a supervisor -- who
was mostly concerned with file management and traffic rather than actual
operation.

I worked as an on-line editor / vision-mixer at the post facility in
Toronto (VTR on Scollard) where five Super-HiBand AVR-3's were  in
service; three directly controlled by an RA-(4000?) editor (with a Vital
Squeezoom!) for A/B Roll editing, and two more for duplication, wild
recordings, studio recording, etc.  Several 7.5 ips recording heads were
acquired for feature-length capability when the facility became a
film-transfer point for the new home-video market.  The important thing
was to re-adjust the erase-delay before use!
     There was originally one VPR-2 (which got "Merlin'ed), and later 3
VPR-3's showed up (late 1984?) with an ACE and two ADO's.  And I suspect
those same three VPR-3's continued their careers in Edmonton when the
Toronto company demised a couple of years later.

Its been 23 years, but if there's any little practical hands-on thing
that might help....  We needed to do a lot of on-the-spot things, not
many of them orthodox, to keep them "on-the-air"!  I believe they all
had personalities, like dogs or Douglas Adams' "Marvin", in the
Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

Joe Owens
Presto!Digital Colourgrade
302-9664 106 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5H0N4
+1 780 421-9980
jpo at prestodigital.ca

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