Music Till Dawn on WEEI

[Sid Schweiger]

>>McCurdy still seems to exist in Toronto at mcradio.com<<

Ah, McCurdy.  IIRC they were the perpetrators of one of the truly weirdest blunders in radio broadcasting history, at a place where I once worked.

At the old ABC Radio Network facility at 1926 Broadway in Manhattan, built in the late 1960s, McCurdy was the contractor for almost all the studio equipment, including the studio consoles, the master control console, and the studio console line-input switching arrangements (which used large telephone-company-type stepper switches, in the days before digitally-switched router controls).  They had to pull multi-pair cables from each studio to a switching room off of master control (which was visible from the corridor leading from the hallway to master control; the stepping switches were mounted on upright metal supports), one cable for each switchable line input in each console (each console had between one and four switchable line inputs, depending on its usual function; each input could be switched among 45 different sources).  Apparently the cables were cut to length and the ends prefabbed at the factory.

Well, the guy with the tape measure goofed big-time.  Every single one of those cables was exactly two feet short.  The move-in was delayed by several months while the contractors sat in that switching room, day after day, and painstakingly spliced two feet of extra length onto those prefabbed cables.  Since there were eight studios, an audio tape room (one console with 4 line-input switchers plus 13 RTR machines, each with its own line-input switcher) and master control (16 more line-input switchers), that was a whooooole lotta splicing.




Sid Schweiger
IT Manager, Entercom New England
WAAF/WEEI/WEEI-FM/WKAF/WMKK/WRKO/WVEI/WVEI-FM
20 Guest St / 3d Floor
Brighton MA  02135-2040
P: 617-779-5369
F: 617-779-5379
E: sid@wrko.com