Diversity reception

 Yesterday the blog presented the digitized audio tape from my college graduation.  Which prompted me to remember the movie: "The Conversation" which was from that 1970s time frame.  So I started watching the movie again.  While the movie has a lot of things to discuss concerning the morality of surveillance and the abridgement of freedom and so on I (as a literalist) was struck by the analog world of 1974.  After the start of the movie the main character comes to work to his "cage" on a floor of an abandoned building in San Francisco (I can just imagine it now, teeming with apartments for well paid 21st century informationeers).  

kind of a lonely business

we had these chain link cages at GTE, too

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) has directed a crew of 4 other people (labor was cheap in the 1970s in SF) to tape the conversation of a couple walking around a park.  One of the men walks around with a recorder in a shopping bag.  The other two are in upper floors of surrounding buildings with directional microphones.  He puts the three tapes into three identical reel-to-reel tape recorders and cues each in turn to a synchronizing audio blip. 

UHER - it sounds expensive and European

Then he starts another, bigger, reel-to-reel recorder going which also starts up the first three.  With an audio mixer he can steer and blend the three audio outputs to the fourth recorder to get the most intelligible recording. And control all four recorders to rewind and play, really cool !

felt is easier on the wrist

And I thought:  Diversity Reception - Audio Diversity Reception !   Well, maybe not really but kinda.  

Supposedly the director/author, Francis Ford Coppola, had consultants and had read papers about audio surveillance in the 1960s/70s so it seems really authentic.  The audio machinery has that grimed up, used look but expensive.

good old Morse Products MFG. of Sylmar, CA

Anyway, it's an interesting movie.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm