Audio by The Board
If I hadn't looked so much like the
rest of my family, I'm sure my parents would have suspected aliens had spawned me. How
else to explain my devotion to things electronic? Nobody in my extended family was
technical in the least, but here I was, lusting after audio gear before I could even do
long division.
Not for me your picnic-pack portable record players! I
wanted tape decks. I wanted mountable turntables. I wanted a basement studio with a
separate control room and a window between.
Most of all, I wanted microphones, and the things you could
plug them into. At 11, I remember dragging my father off to my personal Eden, an
electronics parts outlet buried under an office tower just around the corner from his
office. He looked about as much at home there as he would have in a dugout on the
Irrawaddy River.
Still, he gamely bought me a sleek little microphone that I
have to this day. Later, after much pleading on my part and mystification on theirs, my
parents gave me a four-input microphone mixer for Christmas, and I hugged it for a day.
All of this was fuel for my passion for radio, and my
determination to produce professional-sounding programs. To that end, I had accumulated
quite a bit of equipment for my studio, but I knew that what I needed was a proper
"board."
One of my favorite pastimes as a teenager was visiting
radio stations and watching how they worked. I was captivated by those old 16-inch
turntables, the massive Ampex 300 tape recorders, and RCA 77 microphones (those
round-headed jobs that pop into your head when you think of microphones).
But by far the most fascinating thing about any radio
studio was its heart, the control console or -- as it is universally known in radio -- the
board. When I started hanging around radio studios in the 1950s, the typical board
was about four feet long and maybe ten inches high, with a sloping front panel. Along the
bottom was a row of large level control knobs, one for each audio source, plus associated
switching. One or two humungous level meters, flanked by various master knobs and switches
that controlled the overall program, dominated the upper part of the panel.
My own little basement studio had that four-input mixer at
its heart, which was very restricted as to the things you could plug into it. I fantasized
about having something more ambitious that would not only offer more functions, but would
also have the proper high-tech appearance.
It seemed a pretty remote possibility, but I spent
countless hours poring over electronics magazines to find out what sort of circuitry might
be needed. Mostly it was way beyond my capabilities, but I did build one extremely simple
mixing circuit I found in Popular Electronics magazine, which was my bible at the
time. It was held together with alligator clips and bits of twisted wire, so was of little
practical use, but it did work well.
The chances of my ever being able to buy a real studio
console were zip, but the opportunity ultimately arose that let me build my own.
In the spring of 1961, like any 12th-grade student, I
started to think about a possible summer job, and naturally I thought about something in
radio. I sent out dozens of letters to stations in the area, and one of these landed on
the desk of a station owner who, unbeknownst to me, was an acquaintance of my father's. He
didn't have a job for me, but he forwarded my letter to the office of a broadcasting
association, which offered me a six-week stint as general gofer for 35 bucks a week.
The job coincided with my parents' decamping to the lake
for the summer, so there I was, a seventeen-year-old with a house, a car, and a few bucks
in my pocket. It was obviously time to build The Board.
Ian G. Masters at The Board in his basement studio in
1963.
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Electronically it was no big deal. Basically
the mixing circuit was the Popular Electronics one I had built before, but this
time soldered together. For the master controls and monitor amp, I picked up a 14W
Heathkit. For preview, I ripped the one-tube amp out of an old portable record player. For
talkback, I gutted an old Fanon tube intercom I had lying around.
But it was the look that was important. I haunted
the electronics supply stores for just the right hardware. I eventually picked up the
perfect knobs (big and bakelite) and switches (switchboard style, with numerous contacts
and silent operation). The crowning touch was a proper, professional, full-sized VU meter
(50 bucks).
I needed a box to put all this in, and for that I recruited
my school-buddy Jim Anderson. Jim's father was a dentist (as Jim would later be) and avid
woodworker (as Jim already was), and Jim was only too happy after a day of road
construction -- his summer job -- to spend his evenings making sawdust to create the
perfect board. As is often the case with enthusiastic amateurs, the result was flawless,
and ridiculously overbuilt. But it looked perfect, and, rather to my own surprise, it
worked perfectly too, once I mounted all the components.
My parents, when they came home, were appalled that I had
spent every cent I had earned that summer (all $210 of it) on the board, but as teenage
boys will do, I ignored them -- I had this cool piece of equipment that would last me
years.
And it has. I still have it, and although I doubt that it
would function some 40 years after it was built, it still has the look!
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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