Vintage Broadcast Control Boards

I would not say I had a vintage board, but I do have a "collectable." I have L.D. "Doug" Brewer's board he used in his studio at The Party Pirate in Tampa. It escaped the FCC confiscation. 🙂

After the homemade tube mixer which I still love in memory, I foolishly felt pressured to go "solid state," even though clients weren't even aware I used tubes, so I got the same board an AM station had, a Ramko board, which I discovered while filling in for a local announcer.

It had "touch controlled" buttons, based on capacitance between the finger-tips and the electronics. At some times (later found) the buttons didn't respond because my capacitance must have matched the button. The good thing was the sound quality which was very clean and super-flat across the spectrum. Another fault was that the "pots," the mixer volume controls, would not fade 100% to silence. The VCA (voltage controlled amplifiers) somehow did not completely turn off. The factory said "they were aware of the problem" A third problem started after a few years, the plug in cards became intermittent and constantly needed to be jiggled and re-seated. Cleaning didn't help. But the board got hooked to a 15 kHz equalized phone circuit to send programming to an FM station for several years, and we had good audio until lightning hit the phone line and caused a whole string of breakdowns in the mixer, which never got fully repaired. All the parts are still in the basement.

If you are looking to rehab a vintage console, try the components pre-built and available from Radio Design Labs. They are reasonably priced and work great. I have rehabbed several vintage mixers with these beauties.

Hey all,I have a Gates Stereo Producer for sale ,needs some TLC but it is all there. I was going to restore it but too many other projects on my bench. I just love the huge analog meters and the big knobs are classics. You can see it on my website,
www.freewebs.com/wilcomlabs/
and look on the part15 tab.

I guess it's been said that professional mixers are called "boards." I worked a Gates Stereo Producer at an FM facility, and was so impressed that I tracked down the manual and copied some of the circuits for the homemade board I talked about earlier. It is a fantastic board! Please believe me when I say that WILCOM LABS is not paying me for this endorsement.

We had two brand new Gates (Harris) Stereo 80's at our college FM station. Within a few months of installation, they started to fail-- badly. Power supply problems, input boards, you name it... the problem? Bad lytics! They had cleaned the PC boards with some type of flux remover that seeped into the electrolytic capacitors and slowly destroyed them. You should have seen some of those caps: they were puffed up; bursting at the seams! In a few cases the innards were totally exposed!

Those were not Gates' finest effort, although the huge Modutec meters were impressive looking. I still remember them fondly, even though they were awful to maintain. BTW Harris did finally help the station out with some of the costs.

Another awful product: the CBS Volumax 4110. It replaced our previous 410. The station did not use the matching Audimax. Both of them were, in retrospect, terrible. The 410, mainly because it used germanium transistors and drifted all the time, requiring extensive realignment or it would sound awful. The 4110 because it had horrendous overshoot problems when it would clip, making it necessary to cut the deviation way back to avoid excessive modulation peaks. This was due to the use of an elliptic low pass filter. Unfortunately I was not there by the time the station finally scraped together the cash to purchase an Orban.

I have other vintage stories to tell-- the infamous Belar FM1; the serrasoid modulator in the 30-tube exciter used in the ITA 1000... the Ampex 350's (those actually were not too bad)...

I have a cherry condition Broadcast Audio Series IV Board and a Autogram AC-8 also in cherry condition. the AC-8 was signed on the inside cover by all the employees that were involved in designing and building the board.

you can pry the autogram from my cold dead fingers.

$3000.00 might get me to consider parting with my series iv and box of spares. and i say "MIGHT". you would have to catch me in the right mood 😉

Although this board was not highly regarded by radio engineers, I refurbished a 10 channel Harris Medalist console a couple of years back...picked it up on EBay for $125. It needed a good cleaning, but was basically intact (no holes drilled in the panel, etc). The power supply panel was missing, but since it is only the transformers (rectifiers/filtering/regulators are inside the console), it was a simple matter to find a couple of suitable power transformers, mount them on a panel, and make an interconnect cable. After re-capping and fixing a couple of channels, the biggest challenge was the fact that the VU meters had badly faded faces, the red lettering was almost non-existent. I solved that by making a scale with a demo graphics program (forget which), then printing it to a clear plastic sheet (designed for color ink jet printers). These particular sheets come with an adhesive on the back, so I used alcohol to rub off the remaining red and black lettering of the meter face, then stuck the clear sheet over it. This allows the meters to still be lighted, as originally designed.

The other fix was taking care of the rotary knobs which were badly oxidized or something, looked very pitted. I tried buffing them with plastic restorers but nothing worked. I finally bought some new old stock RCA mixer knobs from a surplus store. These are the real RCA MIC 2 1/8 in fader knobs, which the Harris parts were copied from. Anyway, it looks great now.

I now use the Medalist in place of a homebuit console I used for over ten years.

I've been putting together a collection of RCA broadcast equipment over the past 6-7 years and I scored a really beautiful console about 4 years back. It had been setting for years and neglected but after a little work I brought it back to life with a variac. I first had to find why it had been replaced and in typical fashion for a business it had been slowly growing "smaller" as I guess parts and expertese became scarce. Three of the pre-amp boards were disconnected and robbed of parts, several tubes were missing and 1 VU meter was destroyed. I finally got a manual and over time I have repaired the unit to where 6 preamps are functioning and both monitor amps work (I have 1 bad input transformer). Two years ago I bought a NOS Vu meter to replace the one I had done a phony repair on. I just tinker with these things so no real restoration is planned. The rest of my collection includes an RCA 16" transcription record player with Gray tonearm, An RCA record cutting machine for the turntable, An RCA 74B ribbon microphone, and a 1500 pound 1947 RCA BTA-250L 250 watt AM, high fidelity transmitter (very art-deco with 10 meters, probably spent it's life cranking out Hank Williams in some Texas backwater). The only thing not presently functional is the transmitter as it blew out a modulator bias transformer about a year ago and I have not found a replacment.

I've been lurking around here for at least a couple of years; this is my first post.

I have an absolutely lovely RCA 76C console in original working condition. I was very lucky as it spent most of its life as a back-up unit in a tv station in LA. It has virtually none of the damage or wear that is typically seen on boards of this vintage. I even have the original power supply which doubles nicely as a space heater.

I am using the 76C as the centerpiece of an eventual vintage studio. I have a matched pair of RCA 70C turntables that were saved from the landfill by an alert former engineer when they were taken out of a small radio station in northern California. I also have a couple of vintage microphones.

That sounds good. My turntable is a 70D. I have a GE VR cartridge for it but it's not installed yet. Presently I'm using a modern cartridge stuffed in the Grey tonearm. Are you collecting the 16" records? I have about 50 of them including some rare radio shows. Dave

I'm in the middle of restoring my turntables so they're in pieces right now. I have the original RCA tonearms and cartridges, although I have to replace the stylus in one. I don't have many records yet but I keep my eyes open for the 16" transcription discs.

Your 70D and my 70C2s are almost identical mechanically. Both are very nice units.

I have a couple of what I guess are original radio programs (did tv ever use records for the audio part? vitaphone? ) from the Danny Thomas estate on 4 records as I remember, 1 side each, and I bet theiy are the only existing copies of the shows. One of the shows has Jack Benny on it and it's the only funny show. I got some 12" "Audio Disc" blanks for Christmas a couple years ago and made some recordings and they turned out ok but I don't have a way to duplicate the riaa curves yet. It's great fun to spin the old shows into the BC-6b and send it out via the AMT3000. To bad I can't put them through the BTA-250L! That would be all tube all the way. 🙂 Dave

Hi Everybody:

As I mentioned before, I have a really messed up
Gates Studioette board (version three from the
1960s.)

I am taking the whole thing apart. It was found in
a dumpster in the rain at a local radio station.

It even had the very very very small remains of
something the died inside it probably 40 years
ago. There was just some fur in there. (Hope
this doesn't gross anybody out.)

I am going to paint the outside and put in
solid state electronics.

There is one thing that I can't find. The switches
have little black paddles on them. They are like
little squares with rounded corners, and they fit
on the flat shaft of each switch. Except most of
the paddles are missing. If anybody knows of
a source for them I would love to know about it.

This is a slow project. I can't even prime and paint
the cabinet until it gets warmer outside here.
A friend told me that it has to be at least 55 degrees
for spray paint to stick on metal. This is Connecticut.
Outside right now it's about 10 degrees F.

Anyway, I think what you guys are doing to keep the
vintage stuff alive is fantastic. (Actually, WOW! is
probably the best word for that.)

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who likes
this stuff.

Best Wishes
Bruce, MICRO1690/1700