[QuadList] AVR-2 on eBay

Fri Apr 23 04:04:49 CDT 2010

Trevor:

While you're here...I'd like to ask you PAL/NTSC question...but let me tell you and the group the background.

I lived in Japan for two years 65-67 and was able to get a full two day personally guided tour of the brand new (at the time) NHK broadcast center at Tokyo, just after they moved from the old building downtown.

I had an outstanding broadcast engineer guide, and he spoke perfectly good broken english even into deep technical terms.

We we're having lunch in cafeteria and all of sudden he said "NTSC...you know NTSC?...color...very bad...dame (dom-may)...very bad...NTSC.

I responded back that I only knew from growing up that in the early fifties there was something rushed, with our FCC in on it, RCA, CBS and whatever, but that it was rushed, and maybe not well thought out.

I had seen the color banding (moire?) in striped things in picture back when I was learning to do convergence on the RCA CTC-5 TV's when I was a kid.

The NHK fellow closed in on "moire" and something about sub-carrier and stuff.

I finally asked him "Japan adopted that fantastic European train system when they did...so why did they go with the NTSC...instead of the European PAL system? (which at the time I understood does'nt have that moire problem). He gave me a quite serious response, and believe me it was'nt funny, but he said to me we believed that a country like America that had invented the atomic bomb, and atomic power the way we did, that the American color system "must" be vry good and right.

So is'nt (or maybe I should say was'nt...we're all digital now) the PAL system free of the moire problem because of the way it works?

Steve Spears
Orrs Island, Maine
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Trevor Brown 
  To: 'Quad List' 
  Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 4:34 AM
  Subject: Re: [QuadList] AVR-2 on eBay

  Bill

  I fought hard at the time to stop the company buying RCA machines with this option

  The 602 was a poor vector scope and was dependent on the picture monitor if that went down you lost the 602 display

  I was personally happy for a B/W monitor in the bridge, turn the brightness down and it shows head banding up better than a color monitor

  but I still want a color monitor somewhere in the system, in PAL you can get the burst to chroma phase 180 degrees out and it looks OK on a vector scope.

  I could live with a slot monitor for this, if it was a choice that or a Delta gun that never really converged, and most available at the time were un reliable,

  I think we ended up with Barco monitors in the end, but not in the bridge

  Trevor 

  UK Member

  From: quadlist-bounces at quadvideotapegroup.com [mailto:quadlist-bounces at quadvideotapegroup.com] On Behalf Of Bill Carpenter
  Sent: 23 April 2010 06:06
  To: Quad List
  Subject: Re: [QuadList] AVR-2 on eBay

  Hey Chris,

  I forgot one thing, in 1976 that machine was worth 100K$, and the fully loaded monitor bridge, was worth twice the current asking price. It sold for over 10K$, and Ampex was Tektronix's largest single customer, because of the way the bridge was configured. 

  I was told that broadcasters would not buy a color "slot mask" monitor made from a consumer product (14" Sony Trinatron) in each tape machine. The thing that made it work was the decoder in the monitor, which drove the 602 display, to allow you to "phase up the machine" for playback without a external Vectorscope!

  The NTSC pushbutton was required since the colors in the flesh tones were wrong compared to Conrac (dot matrix, USA color based) monitors.

  So, in the first year over 80% of the 256 machines we shipped went with the fully loaded bridge worth over 10K$ 

  But, then I had only been involved with broadcast products for a year and a half and really didn't know anything about products for the broadcast marketplace?

  Bill Carpenter

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  From: "Chill315 at aol.com" <Chill315 at aol.com>
  To: dwnorwood at embarqmail.com; quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com
  Sent: Thu, April 22, 2010 6:30:59 PM
  Subject: Re: [QuadList] AVR-2 on eBay

  The serial number is low, 352.  It looks like they updated it with the digital timer.  If you will note, it does not have the circuit breaker kit.  One would want to consider a couple of field mod upgrades to it but it does look in good shape from the photos.  It should be in the range where the design was fairly stable.

  Chris

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