Here is the former CJAV master control in Port Alberni, as photographed on the 30th of March, 2005 by the station engineer.
In September 2005, CJAV, AM 1240 signed off, and 93.3 FM, "The Peak" signed on from new studios.
The SPARC Museum was invited generously by the General Manager to take most of the retired studio gear, and even the one-kilowatt AM transmitter and related transmitter-site equipment. We were delighted! Now for the details...
The Front Panel - as received, and after mods
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Restoration Details (for broadcast junkies)
Configuring for Operation (for broadcast-engineer junkies)
CJAV had been broadcasting since April,1946 on 1240 kHz AM. In September 2005, they moved to the FM band. Along with a new transmitter building, they also built new studios, and retired all the old audio equipment. This McCurdy SS4388 had served well as their master control board. In the "before" picture, it is still in the old control room. Now it serves as SPARC's board on remotes, and as a spare for our Northern Electric console. After a thorough refit, it made its first appearance at Mackin House in July 2006. Coverage of this event can be found elsewhere on our website.
The visible changes seen above are as follows: the addition of new remote start buttons for tape, turntable, and triple-cart deck -- a change-out of the push-button selector at the right -- a new mike-boom socket -- a set of new labels (the older key labels were on the backside of the green label-strip) - and a general clean-up of all the pen-and-pencil doodling. I couldn't resist having our RCA BK-5 ribbon mike in this picture. ...Scroll down for more... or
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The cue speaker must have been made external somewhere in time, as the internal one was missing. A perfect replacement was found and installed. Related to this was the replacement of components in the cue amplifier. One diode was added to the design to lower the cross-over distortion. Next, the cue amplifier was made available at one of the headphone jacks.
The cue selector switch-bank was very worn out. Some buttons wouldn't lock - they needed small wads of paper to keep them down. At SPARC, the closest substitute we could find was bigger, necessitating lots of steel-panel filing on the opening. Also, it had only eight positions, which accommodated only the eight input channels on this board. Originally, the two extra 'M' buttons selected the cue-pot bus and program feed. The wiring was rearranged so that this remaining switching was handled by an unused three-position lever key, just below the cue speaker. The Cue and Monitor knobs were replaced.
In the truck-load of CJAV gear, we found a nice McCurdy monitor speaker, plus the original 10-Watt amplifier for it. That was re-installed and cabled up - it was perfect. To accommodate situations where we don't want to tote the big monitor speaker, the cue speaker can play the role as a small control-room monitor.
A number of the lever keys were broken. Happily, there were boxes of CJAV spare parts that provided the replacements. While working on these, I made the decision to add talkback to the control-room mike key. Part of that task resulted in moving the on-air switching of the microphone keys from the pre-amp inputs over to the outputs of the faders. This meant that the mike pots can be left up, and contribute no noise to the program output when the keys are off.
Finally, a number of modifications made over the years were returned to factory configuration.
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Broadcast consoles are normally cabled in position. All the input and output cables are brought in and soldered to tag strips or fastened under the screw-terminals of barrier strips. It's a labour-intensive process. To take the desired gear to a remote location, we wanted a faster setup, so two termination boxes were made up - one for the audio XLR connectors, the other for the remote-start connections. The picture shows these (along with the turntable RIAA preamp box).
The boxes have 25-pin DB-25 connectors that mate to connectors inside the console - the control connector is behind the front panel, and the audio connector (line-level only) is on the back wall near the internal tag strips.
This McCurdy is an in-desk console. A table with removable legs was purchased, and a cutout put into the top for the McCurdy to drop into. I can just barely lift the board into the hole. The underside of the table has lockdown screws for the termination boxes and a large power bar.
Pictured here is the entire setup, assembled as a dry run for an upcoming broadcast date. For this event, we were using two Revox tape machines for our music. The A-77 also came from CJAV. For this remote, we used a second tape (PR-99, with monitor-amp panel) instead of a Panasonic SP-10 MK II turntable. The triple-cart machine played our SPARC IDs and vintage commercials. The Marconi signal generator under the PR-99 is our AM transmitter. The McCurdy amplified monitor speaker has been plunked into an armchair. The monitor has muting controlled by the microphone key. Relay wiring was also added to this key for our vintage "ON-AIR" sign illumination.
The dog and the seven-and-a-half-foot grand piano were not taken to the event.
Overall, this McCurdy board, with all the changes to the switching, can now be used as either announce/operate or as separate operator and talk-studio announcer with talkback. It's a great on-air console. The CKNW "Crystal Palace" broadcast trailer (also retired) has one of these. There's a picture of that one on the SPARC NEWS page. We actually originated our programming from it at the September 2008 Tree Fest event! The audio was linked back to the museum building about 300 meters away, and heard on the Museum floor for our regular opening day.