Beatles for karaoke - an appeal to Lord Reith, Csnyfan and other enthusiasts

[recordroman]

Brings back memories!

[Mixerrog]

My Quad system for many years included a Heathkit AN-2016 (which I still have - buy PM me?) & a Dynaco QSA-300.

I liked designing + building electronic projects & still do.

Rog

[Lord Reith]

You had surround in your car? Wow, that must have been... weird! Like being in a much larger car.

[Lord Reith]

Brings back memories!

Ahh, I used to make loads of little boxes like that! I made a filter set, a stereo expander, and a noise reduction unit (for playback only). I also made a wideband AM radio which sounded almost as good as FM, albeit in mono.

Oh, and I made a compressor but couldn't afford a box to put it in, so I built it into an empty vhs cassette. It was an amazing conversation piece! People would do a double take and say, "What the hell is that?!"

Everybody wants to code these days. The skills of actually making things are completely lost among the younger generations.

(shuffles off to grumble about the weather and how a loaf of bread used to cost 5 cents...)

[Mixerrog]

LR,

We are getting a little off topic (sorry) but I have also built & designed (being a Electrical Engineer) many many electronic projects like you mentioned.

My AM receiver had the Motorola AM Stereo decoder, Mura 10 khz wideband IF Filters + 10 KHz active whistle filter to eliminate that high frequency whistle due to the US 10 khz AM channel spacing I used to hear -- LOL! I think the UK uses 9 khz spacing so I might still hear that. You probably know Spectral filtering is great to get rid of that whistle now in older AM recording that my younger brother made lots of.

In the past, I also built a large 4 foot loop antenna for DXing AM with my own design double balanced FET amp with remote varicap diode tuning & rotor mounted in my backyard tree about 15 feet up. I could get AM Stereo from WSM Nashville in the Daytime which is 625 miles direct! I took it down several years ago but I am now just rebuilding a 1 foot version to mount on my tower at about 30 feet up to listen to occasional AM Radio since all the digital stuff now days puts out so much AM interference. I like using the new SDR radios now.

Rog

[Lord Reith]

Yeah, AM must be unlistenable these days. But back in the 80s it sounded nearly as good as FM with a bandwidth up to 9khz on the radio I made. As the sun set the 9khz whistle would gradually get louder and louder but i ended up making a filter for that out of a coil and a couple of capacitors. I still ahve that radio... must plug it ina nd see how it sounds now.

I also made a mini FM transmitter which allowed me to wander around the house with a portable radio and listen to my records. I then found that by changing a few components it would reach a couple of blocks, so i then got in the habit of listening to my boots as I walked the dog down the park! I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood "tuned in" and thought, "Wow, good station!"

[Tex]

25 years ago I made a difference amplifier using a 741 operation amp IC and the schematic in one of the little Radio Shack (Tandy) hobby booklets. It was basically a center cancel (vocal remover) thing and the output was mono of course. It was built on a small breadboard and housed in an aluminum case (Radio Shack again) with a power switch and in/out jacks. In 2000 or so I tossed when I got a computer and realized I could do the same digitally without a mess of wires and also save the output.

Around that time I also figured out if I shorted a small value capacitor across the R/L wires on my headphones I could get the treble to fold down to the middle and the amount of treble depended on which value capacitor you used. It was like primitive spectral mixing. It was was pretty darn cool being able to hear cymbals and percussion closer to the middle. If I had working knowledge of RC crossover circuits I would have made a custom crossover box but this was pre-Internet so it was harder learning stuff.

[Mixerrog]

Engonoceras,

I also built similar circuits with op-amps including a neat one called "Stereo Rotator" that was op-amp based & allowed you to rotate the stereo field in the 70s much before digital.

I used it to move the vocals to the center on the early Beatles 2 track mixes & other songs with off center vocals. When used with the early quad decoders, you could get some interesting sounding quad decoding also since it was based on phase shifts & additions + subtractions. It was a pretty simple circuit but required a triple gang potentiometer which I basically had to mechanically build.

Rog