Hello! I'm Peter, your host for this group of SPARC pages. I do volunteer work at the SPARC Vintage Radio Museum in Coquitlam, British Columbia. For international readers, that's on the Canadian west coast. My area of interest is vintage broadcast -- equipment, program material, and history. I maintain this page for SPARC to inform you of the latest news and notes from the working studio at the SPARC Vintage Radio Museum. (updated 14 December/2010.)
...You can listen to the SPARC Broadcast program over the internet. Go to the link by clicking on the meter.
See our studio at the SPARC Museum, where we broadcast on the floor
Our stereo Control Room where our Internet Radio originatesMore of our Broadcast Pages to look at:
A Gallery of some of Location Broadcasts - "Remotes"
The SPARC collection of Broadcast Consoles
The News and Notes Archive
Before continuing, you can be listening to a sample audio file produced by the SPARC broadcast section by clicking here, or on the meter scale. (It's a 2.8MB mp3 file, and runs 12 minutes) -- No, this sound file will not repeat as mentioned near the end.
To contact me concerning the SPARC broadcast section, e-mail me at sparcmuseum@telus.net
To go to the SPARC museum's home page, visit www3.telus.net/radiomuseum
You are visitor number
since 25 January, 2008
Jack is "on the air" with his Vintage Oldies program -- I'm standing behind him, watching operations, thinking how something in our display could be improved!
The heart of our control room here is the Northern Electric 5420 console (used at CKNW by Jack Cullen), flanked on the left by two Ampex AG-440 tape machines, an ITC triple-deck cart machine (just behind Jack's head), and flanked on the right by a venerable Magnecord PT-6 tape machine (ex-CKNW), and two McCurdy/Panasonic turntables. At the bottom left is our McCurdy 16-inch turntable for playing transcription discs, and our classic Ampex 300 tape machine, the edge of which barely appears in the lower left of the picture. In this picture, our on-air microphone is a 1947 Shure 55 Unidyne, one of the world's most enduring designs. Also, notice our master/slave clock system, donated by CBC Vancouver. This control room originates to low-power transmitters for the radios on display.
From time to time, other working items come and go. As of this writing, an Ampex AG-600 is now on the desk, the operator's mike is an EV 664, and a Denon cassette machine is there.
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The Internet Radio that SPARC uses for the programs you hear is still somewhat experimental (Dec 2010). At the moment, we are using Windows Media Encoder 9, on our own server.
The photo shows the main control room where our stereo programs originate, or are produced. As well, any of our members can originate to our Internet Radio station.
Some of the equipment:
(The Studer D 740 CD Burner is out of the picture).
The equipment is always changing as new restorals get completed, and submit to trials.
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