Price Is Right's midcentury modern tech
BB pal Drew Carey snapped the photo above in the Price Is Right studio. From Drew's Twitter stream:
A patch panel from the 1950's that we still use. Surprised our studio monitors don't use vacuum tubes. :)Drew Carey on Twitter
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I love stuff like this.
My high school had a little analog TV switch panel to send video from big reel-to-reel video tape units to various classrooms. A tiny version of the mess shown above.
Yeah, I was in the A.V. squad. We set up tapes and started them at the appointed hour. We also had a couple of breadloaf-sized video cameras and transportable VTRs we could wheel to a classroom to tape plays or debates or whatever.
Looks like Auntie Mame's switchboard:
If you've ever wondered why they can't restart the Range Game for 37 hours once the rangefinder's been stopped, this is why.
Lighting hard patch.
Still very useful.
Yeah, CBS Television City is a treasure trove of antique TV stuff. I was in a storeroom once, it was full of obsolete TV equipment like old Ampex 2 inch videotape machines that were probably decommissioned in the late 1960s, and old TV monitors that were round (must date back to the 1950s). I think they just keep that stuff around in case they need it as props.
I object to the term midcentury. We are no longer in the 20th century.
"Surprised our studio monitors don't use vacuum tubes. :)"
So am I, since CRTs are still usually considered superiour to LCD monitors.
Wow, if you guys are impressed by that, I should snap a photo of the Master Control Room at the Norwegian Broadcasting Company.
Yeah, a few months ago I was so lucky as to see a 2-inch Quadruplex VTR in operation (transferring some archive material over to Digibeta). The perpendicular-scan video head spinup sound is supremely satisfying.
hey, if it ain't broke...
@#5
I think at least some of it is kept around for those rare times when someone finds a box of old, unmarked media stuffed away in a drawer. Just in case they find things like Johnny Carson's first tonight show broadcast, it'd be nice if they had the means to play it / transfer it.
(yeah, I know, The tonight show's not a CBS property. Work with me here people.)
If it ain't broke. . . .
(However in this case, if it IS broke. . . oy vey!)
I imagine this stuff hangs-on because the downtime required to yank it out, replace it with modern kit, and get the new stuff sorted-out and de-bugged would conflict with the tight production schedules. And, if it still gets the job done...
Built, no doubt, before the days of electronic routers. So there are undoubtedly racks of DA's (distribution amps) behind the outbound patch points, as patchbays are not point-to-multipoint.
The racks of DA's, however, are far less photogenic. Until you go around to the rear of the rack.
Telephone patch panels solve the problem in a very nice old-school way. They also literally last forever, as shown here.
You can bet the dimmers they connect to are probably 4000 watts and up as well. Modern equipment has gone the way of smaller and more, but there's something nice about knowing you can just keep plugging gear into a 7k dimmer without having to worry about running out of juice.
A graticule.
We used an old Strand lighting patch bay at our theater company, similar to that for years, until it was replaced about a decade ago. It handled 3/4 of a megawatt and sat at the back corner of the fly floor. When it was full loaded and they brought up a bright scene, the conduits running to them would hum so loud that it made you nervous to stand near it.