Most important blank boxes from GVG

If you have had any audio or most video dubbed with us, the signals went through these very drab-looking beige boxes.

But don't be fooled; these are our routing switchers, which feed signals to and from my various VCRs and other sources to be recorded or monitored.

The beauty of the revolution in Digital Television makes a lot of equipment "obsolete".  No obsolescence here.  This relatively old (by a couple of decades) system is solid equipment
by Grass Valley Group.  They were a big manufacturer of broadcast TV equipment.

There are frames for Stereo Audio and 2 Video frames.  One video frames routes digital audio over coaxial cable INCLUDING Dolby Digital signals in 5.1 surround - or 3/2/LFE, and 2/0 stereo and uncompressed PCM (more on how this happens later).   Everything analog video and audio runs through this system as well for what the GVG 20-Ten was designed for.

But what is NOT obsolete; an ability to control it with a computer app.  Above, right is a screen-shot of a program I wrote to control it (control happens over ethernet to RS-232 adapter, plugged into the GVG "Serial Interface") allowing external computer control.  I can control the router wirelessly with this application on a wireless-enabled PC.   The last program that did THAT was probably in DOS!

Surround Sound, BEFORE Dolby

In the 70's, well before all this Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound or even it's predecessor, Dolby Surround that came out in the late 80's and 90's, we had stereo.  And it was good.  Quadraphonic was an interesting experiment for the 70's, but required re-buying all the stereo components to be Quad compatible.

Some devised a solution; a very crude yet strangely effective solution and it looked like this:

 There is the single zip cord on the bottom of the diagram, tied to the positive speaker posts.
This is how we made surround, with a single speaker in the back of the room. 

Many amps/receivers had two pairs of speaker outputs (for what I am describing, they needed to be isolated from each other) and a switch often labeled "A", "B", and "A+B" to play two pairs of speakers at once.  Maybe one pair was in the living room and the other pair on the porch.

In this case, the "B" pair is the surround speaker.  You turn the speaker selector to "A+B" and you get....surround sound from ANY stereo source.  Any sound not common (in perfect mono and in phase) to the left and right channels plays out the surround  (sometimes FM noise and tape-head azimuth problems resulting in phase errors on the stereo program).  But for a quick-and-dirty means, this was great.  Often the vocal track would disappear here (unless mixed in mid-60's "Beatles-type stereo)
leaving the rest of the music on it's own.  Nothing was MIXED for surround.  It just worked in various ways on various soundtracks.  And it was COOL.  A view to the future, when Quadrophonic was reborn in a sense as......5.1 Surround sound!