Of Plywood and Audio Origins
Author Ian Masters at the controls of the World's
Oldest Non-Existent Radio Station in 1963.
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For most of us, the opening of the
local Fall fair must produce very vivid reactions. Mostly, it's the event itself, a kid
heaven of nauseating rides and even more nauseating food. But for me it also conjures up
some very specific sensory memories. Strangely, one of the clearest is triggered every
time I smell freshly cut plywood. One late summer day when I was 12, I came home from the
fair to be greeted by this evocative scent in the house, and I knew work had begun on my
studio.
By that time, I was fascinated by anything to do with
radio. We had a TV by then, but I was (and am) a radio kid, and I had littered my bedroom
with various bits of electronics, with a view to making some of my own radio programs. I
had a microphone and some beat-up turntables, and sometimes my father would let me use his
tape recorder.
The resulting mess made such chores as room cleaning or
doing homework less-than-simple matters, although it took up somewhat less room than my
previous mess, which was caused by running my beloved electric trains under beds and
chairs and the feet of unwary visitors. Ultimately, I sold the trains and bought some
rudimentary audio gear.
But the bedroom was hardly ideal for this stuff, so I
decided to call in a marker.
During my train period, I had often set up the tracks not
in my own space but in the family room, and one day my father offered to build me a room
for them in a fairly large empty area in the furnace room -- anything to get the mess out
from underfoot. I didn't take him up on his offer at the time, but once I had transferred
my affections to sound equipment, I approached him to see if the offer was still open. I
thought it would be nifty to have my own radio studio.
Amazingly, he agreed. A carpenter was coming in to do some
other work, and he could knock together a few plywood walls for me.
I had visited various real radio stations, and I knew what
I wanted. The outer wall contained an area about seven feet wide by about twice that long,
with a salvaged door at one end. Inside, the area was divided by a wall halfway along,
which contained a narrow door to one side and a plate-glass window. One side would be the
studio, and the other the control room.
I blew a few weeks' allowance on some acoustic tile for the
ceiling of the studio section, carpeted the floor with scraps of broadloom I found around
the basement, and hung absorptive curtains on its walls. That room was dead!
The control room took a little longer to evolve, but
eventually I trashed the old record players and bought a pair of matching turntables that,
although not high fidelity by the standards of today -- or even then -- had one great
characteristic: an almost instant start, which is a necessity when you're doing real-time
programs. I spent 40 bucks on a tape recorder a buddy's dad was getting rid of; it ran
slightly off speed, but that didn't matter as I only played tapes made on the same
machine.
The crowning glory was my home-designed and -built control
console, which cost me every penny I earned in the summer job I held that year. I still
have it and, even though it doesn't work any more, it still looks great.
From the moment the last bit of sawdust was swept up
(perhaps the last time the room saw a broom), I lived in that studio, attended by various
friends and hangers-on, attracted mostly by the stack of rock'n'roll records I was
accumulating.
Most of us learned to smoke in that tiny hole, and its
proximity to my mother's chest freezer was a definite advantage when, in the university
years, we graduated to beer. One of the last remaining bits of my university education is
the knowledge that it takes exactly half an hour in a freezer for a beer to go from
lukewarm to drinkable.
The "station" had an identity, of course. I
dubbed it "CRFH," ignoring the fact that no Canadian station has an
"R" in that position ("FH" are the neighborhood's initials), and gave
it a frequency of 960 because that sounded good and wasn't in use anywhere close by (I
looked it up). When I finally made the upgrade to stereo, I couldn't think of particularly
good numbers, so I simply called it "CRFH Stereo."
The station really took off when I got to university and
bumped into a similarly obsessive buddy, Joe, who was likewise successfully managing to
ignore his studies. We both harbored notions of careers in radio (he actually got to have
one), and rationalized all the time we spent in the studio as educational. Actually, it
was.
Joe and I and a huge imaginary CRFH staff produced programs
and ads and promos and newscasts for several years before the real world caught up with
us. We still do the occasional program, because, even though I haven't lived in that house
for almost 40 years, CRFH has traveled with me and has had a presence in each of my
subsequent homes; it's now in its sixth location.
Whenever I tell anybody about CRFH, they always ask if I
had one of those low-power transmitters advertised in, I think, comic books that let you
send sound to your neighbors. I never did -- I was into production, not distribution.
But CRFH did get its 15 minutes (literally) of fame on the
20th anniversary of its founding, in 1976, when a national radio program did a profile,
including some of the best bits from the FH glory years. For the occasion, we used the
slogan "The World's Oldest Non-Existent Radio Station." It's still probably
true.
Anyway, if you're wandering around the fair in the next few
days, I'll be the one with the grape Sno-Cone and the chunk of fresh-cut three-ply.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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