Oddity Archive: Episode 281.4 - Ben’s Junk: A Tower of Vidicraft
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- čas přidán 31. 07. 2024
- …’cause it’s Vidicraft, wicked Vidicraft. And, although I know it’s strictly taboo…*
*Apologies to Frank Sinatra
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0:21 - Intro
3:21 - Detailer II
7:43 - Guard Stabilizer
10:26 - Proc Amp
13:54 - Stereo Synthesizer Intro
17:23 - Stereo Synthesizer Demo
20:01 - Commercial Alert Intro
23:59 - Commercial Alert Demo
I never thought I would see someone try to recreate an analog TV broadcast to test the effectiveness of a 40+ year old piece of equipment.
What are modulators, honestly?
"Jena, cancel my remaining meetings, oddity just posted a new vid"...
I like how all five of these pieces of hardware have generally the same design yet there’s three different kinds of font for “Vidicraft” spread out among them.
Thomas here. Awesome to see you hunt down all that other gear! I wish there was some info on the person doing all this early vidicraft stuff, and how they were advertising in hobbyist magazines and the like or if it was more used in commercial settings? I'm old enough that I had one year of shop class in school before it was ousted for "computer lab," and the actual construction on these boxes is eerily similar to the materials and methods we used in shop to make metal boxes.
4:31 Fun fact: Arch Hall Jr. went on to have a career as a pilot for FedEx and retired in 2003.
The Original Tower of Power.
You're going to have to figure out how to make *art* with this.
That Commercial Alert system definitely looks like something coming out of an emergency override setup. I wonder if Vidicraft actually did make similar override models that actually faced competition against other override companies such as CommAlert by Scientific Atlanta and the Idea/Onics among others.
I could see some of these being useful for intentional artificial teknikel diffikultees in OA episode segments/livestreams.
It's possible the 1-2-3 ad's blue screen had dark enough *luma* to detect as a black screen. The fact that a *color* TV would decode it as blue is probably irrelevant to the box. Perhaps it doesn't decode chroma as part of detection it just goes by the raw signal levels. Maybe it goes by an average of luma per scanline as well.
Interesting devices... I would assume those separate mono and color modes are not separate treatment of luminance and chrominance, but rather to select if the input signal you are feeding through is black&white or colour. DNR stands for Dynamic Noise Reduction, it's a simple system that unlike Dolby does not need the audio to be processed when recorded. It is indeed basically just a low-pass filter, however, the corner frequency is adjusted automatically depending on the level of the input audio signal. Quiet signals where noise is more audible are filtered with a lower corner frequency (cutting off more noise) than loud signals where much of the noise is masked anyways. The threshold adjustment allows you to match the input signal to the behaviour of the DNR system.
The Proc Amp probably just needs all of its switches and potentiometers cleaned.
Watch out for snakes!
Oh hey, I have some of those as well haha
11:24 The controls likely need to be cleaned on the Proc Amp.
Cool mix
I wish they had some device that would warn me when that GOD AWFUL Behr paint commercial came on. Of course, it would constantly go off because they show it enough times.
Proc-amp might be dirty pots though I assume you already checked.
were you a fan of the Gerry Todd Show?