Seven Second Delay

[iraapple]

Dave Tepe is a retired radio engineer who had a featured article in Society
of Broadcast Engineer - Pittsburgh Chapter.

The item below is an excerpt from that newsletter of September of 2003 and
mentions how we did it in 1959 at WJAS.  By the way, both the Engineer and
the host had control over the delay button.

It was always my belief that the reason the delay was seven seconds rather
than some other period of time was because that is ho long it took for a
word to go from the RECORC of the first Magnacorder to the PLAYBACK of the
other Magnacorder racked beside it in another frame.  I never heard a better
explanation of why seven seconds as opposed to any other amount of time.

 
Ira Apple

 "We did a tape delay for the early phone-in talk shows of Ira Apple and
Merle Pollis by running a tape between 2 Magnacord tape machines and later
upgraded to carts by swapping the record and play heads.  Since this was
NBC, the machines were RCA, cart machines were just coming out in the early
60's. "