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 24 December/2008.)
** NEW! ** You can listen to the SPARC Broadcast program (experimental server, right now). Go to the link by clicking on the meter.
See our studio at the museum, where we broadcast fromBroadcast Pages to look at:
A Gallery of some of Location Broadcasts - "Remotes"
The SPARC collection of Broadcast Consoles
The News and Notes Archive
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, 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. Presently, 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.
As of March/2008, the CJAV McCurdy board has been given the temporary assignment of being our console while the Northern Electric is out for some rewiring. That's what you will find here, if you visit SPARC today.
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Before continuing, you can be listening to an audio file produced by the SPARC broadcast section by clicking on the VU meter. (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
To go to the SPARC museum's home page, visit
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since 25 January, 2008