[QuadList] PTL Club--Quad duplication 1974-78--What do you know?

[Dave Satin]

Actually the nexus for high speed quad duplication was in New York, at EUE/Screen Gems. I worked in the videotape department in the late 1970s and early 1980s. High Speed was located on the 4th floor,across the corridor from the tape room that serviced the soap operas which were shot on the 6th floor. 
The first step in high speed quad dubbing was to create a Mirror Image Master or MIM, which was done on a modified AVR 1 that recorded on metal tape and ran backwards. That is to say that the supply reel was located on the right, the take up was on the left, and used a modified mark X head assembly, with a head wheel that ran counter clockwise. We would wind the metal tape onto Pyrex glass reels because the degausser, which was designed and built in house was so powerful, that magnetic induction would cause the aluminum reels to melt. 
MIMs were created in real time, by dubbing. After the MIM was done, it was threaded onto the high speed duplicator which had 5 or 6 slave tape transports. The high speed duplicator printed the tracks from the master to the slaves with a combination of heat and pressure and would run a 30 minute show in 6 minutes.
The MIM systems (we had 2 of them) were installed to service the syndication department, and 
we duplicated Match Game, Barney Miller, and many other shows that were syndicated by King World and other program syndicators. The finished dubs would go out and be by bicycled from station to station, and eventually return to the tape department where every tape was a mystery.
We would dub the shows on to new Scotch and Fuji tape and we would get back a mush mosh of old tape, tapes with splices, Memorex, and god knows what else. We would send out full reels and find that certain stations would cut off any extra tape on the reel after the shows final fade to black and use it themselves.....And I don't want to even talk about the pornos!
Wow thanks for shaking up some old fond memories

Dave Satin
Sent from my iPad5